George Bernard Shaw Quotes

Irish playwright, critic, and polemicist (1856–1950)

George Bernard Shaw (26 July 1856 – 2 November 1950), known at his insistence simply as Bernard Shaw, was an Irish playwright, critic, polemicist and political activist with a range incorporating both contemporary satire and historical allegory. He wrote more than sixty plays, including such works as Man and Superman (1902), Pygmalion (1913) and Saint Joan (1923). Shaw was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1925.

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Alternative Names: Bernard Shaw • G.B. Shaw • G. Bernard Shaw

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HIGGINS. The great secret, Eliza, is not having bad manners or good manners or any other particular sort of manners, but having the same manner for all human souls: in short, behaving as if were in Heaven, where there are no third-class carriages, and one soul is as good as another.

Hell is full of musical amateurs.

But to admire a strong person
and to live under that strong person’s thumb are
two different things.

I don't know if there are men on the moon, but if there are they must be using the earth as their lunatic asylum

Few people think more than two or three times a year; I have made an international reputation for myself by thinking once or twice a week.

HIGGINS. Have you no morals, man?
DOOLITTLE [unabashed] Cant afford them, Governor. Neither could you if you was as poor as me.

A man learns to skate by staggering about and making a fool of himself. Indeed he progresses in all things by resolutely making a fool of himself.

A fashion is nothing but an induced epidemic.

Shall I turn up the light for you?

No, give me deeper darkness. Money is not made in the light.

Bear it like a man, even if you feel it like an ass.

The best way to get your point across is to entertain.

...a man of great common sense and good taste, meaning thereby a man without originality or moral courage.

It exasperated her to think that the dungeon in which she had languished for so many unhappy years had been unlocked all the time, and that the impulses she had so carefully struggled with and stifled for the sake of keeping well with society, were precisely those by which alone she could have come into any sort of sincere human contact.

Like all young men, you greatly exaggerate the difference between one young woman and another.

A learned man is an idler who kills time by study.