George Bernard Shaw

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.

I hear you say "Why?" Always "Why?" You see things; and you say "Why?" But I dream things that never were; and I say "Why not?"

My method is to take the utmost trouble to find the right thing to say, and then to say it with the utmost levity.

See also:

Man and Superman (1903)

Quotes

My specialty is being right when other people are wrong.

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them: that's the essence of inhumanity.

All great truths begin as blasphemies.

Must then a Christ perish in torment in every age to save those that have no imagination?

One man that has a mind and knows it can always beat ten men who haven't and don't.

Statue of Shaw in Niagara-on-the-Lake

1890s

• The old Whigs and new Tories of the school of Cobden and Bright, the "Philosophic Radicals," the economists of whom Bastiat is the type, Lord Wemyss and Lord Bramwell, Mr. Herbert Spencer and Mr. Auberon Herbert, Mr. Gladstone, Mr. Arthur Balfour, Mr. John Morley, Mr. Leonard Courtney: any of these is, in England, a more typical Anarchist than Bakounin. They distrust State action, and are jealous advocates of the prerogative of the individual, proposing to restrict the one and to extend the other as far as is humanly possible, in opposition to the Social-Democrat, who proposes to democratize the State and throw upon it the whole work of organizing the national industry, thereby making it the most vital organ in the social body.
  • 'The Impossibilities of Anarchism', a paper read to the Fabian Society on 16 October 1891, reprinted in The Impossibilities of Anarchism (Fabian tract no. 45, 1895), pp. 4–5

• Patriotism is, fundamentally, a conviction that a particular country is the best in the world because you were born in it...
  • The World (15 November 1893)

• Pasteboard pies and paper flowers are being banished from the stage by the growth of that power of accurate observation which is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it...
  • The World (18 July 1894), Music in London 1890-1894 being criticisms contributed week by week to The World (New York: Vienna House, 1973)

• But no public man in these islands ever believes that the Bible means what it says: he is always convinced that it says what he means; and I have no reason to hope that Mr Coote may be an exception to the rule.
  • "The Living Pictures", The Saturday Review, LXXIX (April 6, 1895), 443, reprinted in Our Theatres in the Nineties (1932). Vol. 1. London: Constable & Co. 79-86

• My method is to take the utmost trouble to find the right thing to say, and then to say it with the utmost levity.
  • Answers to Nine Questions (September 1896), answers to nine questions submitted by Clarence Rook, who had interviewed him in 1895

• Die Walküre is endured by the average man because it contains four scenes for which he would sit out a Scotch sermon, or even a House of Commons debate. These are the love duet in the first act, Brunnhilde's announcement of death in the second, the ride of the Valkyries and the 'fire-charm' in the third. For them the ordinary playgoer endures hours of Wotan, with Christopher Sly's prayer in his heart. 'Would 'twere over!' Now, I am one of those elect souls who are deeply moved by Wotan. I grant you that as a long-winded, one-eyed gentleman backing a certain champion in a fight and henpecked out of his fancy because his wife objects to the moral character of the champion, he is a dreary person indeed . . . but to one who has understood all its beauties, its lofty aspirations, its tragedy, there is nothing trivial, nothing tedious in Die Walküre.
  • comments after attending the 1896 Bayreuth Festival. Quoted in "Visits to Valhalla: The Ectasy And the Agony" by Carolyn Abbatte, New York Times, March 26, 1989. Access date April 1, 2021.

• We have no more right to consume happiness without producing it than to consume wealth without producing it.
  • Candida, Act I (1898)

• I'm only a beer teetotaler, not a champagne teetotaler. I don't like beer.
  • Candida, Act III

• We don't bother much about dress and manners in England, because as a nation we don't dress well and we've no manners.
  • You Never Can Tell, Act I (1898)

• The great advantage of a hotel is that it's a refuge from home life.
  • You Never Can Tell, Act II

• My specialty is being right when other people are wrong.
  • You Never Can Tell, Act IV

• I had not achieved a success; but I provoked an uproar; and the sensation was so agreeable that I resolved to try again.
  • Plays: Pleasant and Unpleasant, Vol. I, preface (1898)
• There is only one religion, though there are a hundred versions of it.
  • Plays Pleasant and Unpleasant, Vol. II, preface (1898)

• You're not a man, you're a machine.
  • Arms and the Man, Act III (1898)

• Why should you call me to account for eating decently? If I battened on the scorched corpses of animals, you might well ask me why I did that. Why should I be filthy and inhuman? Why should I be an accomplice in the wholesale horror and degradation of the slaughter-house?
  • Interview "What Vegetarianism Really Means: a Talk with Mr Bernard Shaw", in Vegetarian (15 January 1898), reprinted in Shaw: Interviews and Recollections, edited by A. M. Gibbs, 1990, p. 401

Quintessence Of Ibsenism (1891; 1913)

The liar's punishment is, not in the least that he is not believed, but that he cannot believe any one else.

A review of the works and ideas of Henrik Ibsen

• I have never admitted the right of an elderly author to alter the work of a young author, even when the young author happens to be his former self. In the case of a work which is a mere exhibition of skill in conventional art, there may be some excuse for the delusion that the longer the artist works on it the nearer he will bring it to perfection. Yet even the victims of this delusion must see that there is an age limit to the process, and that though a man of forty-five may improve the workmanship of a man of thirty-five, it does not follow that a man of fifty-five can do the same.
  When we come to creative art, to the living word of a man delivering a message to his own time, it is clear that any attempt to alter this later on is simply fraud and forgery. As I read the old Quintessence of Ibsenism I may find things that I see now at a different angle, or correlate with so many things then unnoted by me that they take on a different aspect. But though this may be a reason for writing another book, it is not a reason for altering an existing one.
  • Preface to the 1913 edition

• Just as the liar's punishment is, not in the least that he is not believed, but that he cannot believe any one else; so a guilty society can more easily be persuaded that any apparently innocent act is guilty than that any apparently guilty act is innocent.
  • The Two Pioneers

• The salvation of the world depends on the men who will not take evil good-humouredly, and whose laughter destroys the fool instead of encouraging him.
  • What is the New Element in the Norwegian School?

The Philanderer (1893)

The test of a man or woman's breeding is how they behave in a quarrel.

• It's well to be off with the Old Woman before you're on with the New.
  • Act II

• The fickleness of the women I love is only equaled by the infernal constancy of the women who love me.
  • Act II

• The test of a man or woman's breeding is how they behave in a quarrel.
  • Act IV

Mrs. Warren's Profession (1893)

• People are always blaming circumstances for what they are. I don't believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and, if they can't find them, make them.
  • Vivie, Act II

• There are no secrets better kept than the secrets everybody guesses.
  • Crofts, Act III

• I know Miss Warren is a great devotee of the Gospel of Getting On.
  • Praed, Act IV

Caesar and Cleopatra (1898)

My way hither was the way of destiny; for I am he of whose genius you are the symbol: part brute, part woman, and part God — nothing of man in me at all. Have I read your riddle, Sphinx?

• Hail, Sphinx: salutation from Julius Caesar! I have wandered in many lands, seeking the lost regions from which my birth into this world exiled me, and the company of creatures such as I myself. I have found flocks and pastures, men and cities, but no other Caesar, no air native to me, no man kindred to me, none who can do my day's deed, and think my night's thought.
  • Act I

• My way hither was the way of destiny; for I am he of whose genius you are the symbol: part brute, part woman, and part God — nothing of man in me at all. Have I read your riddle, Sphinx?
  • Act I

• THEODOTUS: Caesar: you are a stranger here, and not conversant with our laws. The kings and queens of Egypt may not marry except with their own royal blood. Ptolemy and Cleopatra are born king and consort just as they are born brother and sister.
  BRITANNUS (shocked): Caesar: this is not proper.
  THEODOTUS (outraged): How!
  CAESAR (recovering his self-possession): Pardon him, Theodotus: he is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature.
  • Act II; sometimes paraphrased as: The customs of your tribe are not laws of nature.

• When a stupid man is doing something he is ashamed of, he always declares that it is his duty.
  • Act III

• Again, there is the illusion of "increased command over Nature," meaning that cotton is cheap and that ten miles of country road on a bicycle have replaced four on foot. But even if man's increased command over Nature included any increased command over himself (the only sort of command relevant to his evolution into a higher being), the fact remains that it is only by running away from the increased command over Nature to country places where Nature is still in primitive command over Man that he can recover from the effects of the smoke, the stench, the foul air, the overcrowding, the racket, the ugliness, the dirt which the cheap cotton costs us.
  • Notes

1900s

• The novelties of one generation are only the resuscitated fashions of the generation before last.
  • Three Plays for Puritans, Preface (1900)

• I delight in the war more & more. It has waked up the country out of its filthy wallowing in money (blood is a far superior bath); and it has put a fourpence on the Income Tax which will never come off it if the Fabian can help it; so that Old Age Pensions will be within reach at the end of the ten years repayment period, if not sooner. ... Charrington calls me a Tory because I declare for Imperialism as our social theory.
  • On the Boer War; letter to Henry Stephens Salt (12 March 1900), as cited in Dan H. Laurence (ed) Collected Letters: 1898–1910 (1985), p. 153

• The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them: that's the essence of inhumanity.
  • The Devil's Disciple, Act II (1901)

• Martyrdom, sir, is what these people like: it is the only way in which a man can become famous without ability.
  • The Devil's Disciple, Act II

• I was a cannibal for twenty-five years. For the rest I have been a vegetarian. It was Shelley who first opened my eyes to the savagery of my diet.
  • Interview "Who I Am, and What I Think", in Frank Harris's periodical The Candid Friend (May 1901), reprinted in Sixteen Self Sketches, 1949, p. 53; quoted in Desmond King-Hele, Shelley: His Thought and Work, 1984, p. 42

• You must not suppose, because I am a man of letters, that I never tried to earn an honest living.
  • The Irrational Knot, Preface (1905)

• [Chess] is a foolish expedient for making idle people believe they are doing something very clever, when they are only wasting their time.
  • The Irrational Knot (1905)

• To understand a saint, you must hear the devil's advocate; and the same is true of the artist.
  • The Sanity of Art: An Exposure of the Current Nonsense about Artists being Degenerate (1908)

• Assassination is the extreme form of censorship; and it seems hard to justify an incitement to it on anti-censorial principles.
  • The Shewing Up of Blanco Posnet (1909): The Rejected Statement, Pt. I : The Limits to Toleration

• This is the real enemy, the invader from the East, the Druze, the ruffian, the oriental parasite; in a word: the Jew.
  • London Morning Post, December 3, 1925

• This craving for bouquets by Jews is a symptom of racial degeneration. The Jews are worse than my own people. Those Jews who still want to be the chosen race (chosen by the late Lord Balfour) can go to Palestine and stew in their own juice. The rest had better stop being Jews and start being human beings.
  • Literary Digest, October 12, 1932

Love Among the Artists (1900)

If you leave your art, the world will beat you back to it. The world has not an ambition worth sharing, or a prize worth handling...

• The way to deal with worldly people is to frighten them by repeating their scandalous whisperings aloud.

• The public want actresses, because they think all actresses bad. They don't want music or poetry because they know that both are good. So actors and actresses thrive and poets and composers starve.

• There are some men who are considered quite ugly, but who are more remarkable than pretty people. You often see that in artists.

• All very fine, Mary; but my old-fashioned common sense is better than your clever modern nonsense.

• If you leave your art, the world will beat you back to it. The world has not an ambition worth sharing, or a prize worth handling. Corrupt successes, disgraceful failures, or sheeplike vegetation are all it has to offer. I prefer Art, which gives me a sixth sense of beauty, with self-respect: perhaps also an immortal reputation in return for honest endeavour in a labour of love.

• Perhaps woman's art is of woman's life a thing apart, 'tis man's whole existence; just as love is said to be the reverse — though it isn't.

• I hate singers, a miserable crew who think that music exists only in their own throats.

• A man's own self is the last person to believe in him, and is harder to cheat than the rest of the world.

• Composers are not human; They can live on diminished sevenths, and be contented with a pianoforte for a wife, and a string quartet for a family.

• Geniuses are horrid, intolerant, easily offended, sleeplessly self-conscious men, who expect their wives to be angels with no further business in life than to pet and worship their husbands. Even at the best they are not comfortable men to live with; and a perfect husband is one who is perfectly comfortable to live with.

• Even the youngest of us may be wrong sometimes.

Man and Superman (1903)

The only man I know who behaves sensibly is my tailor; he takes my measurements anew each time he sees me. The rest go on with their old measurements and expect me to fit them.

• This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap heap; the being a force of Nature instead of a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.
  • p. xxxi

• There is no love sincerer than the love of food.
  • p. 23

• The only man I know who behaves sensibly is my tailor; he takes my measurements anew each time he sees me. The rest go on with their old measurements and expect me to fit them.
  • p. 37

• The confusion of marriage with morality has done more to destroy the conscience of the human race than any other single error.
  • p. 121

• Economy is the art of making the most of life. The love of economy is the root of all virtue.
  • p. 235

Maxims for Revolutionists (1903)

Full text online

• Do not do unto others as you would expect they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same.
  • #1

• If the lesser mind could measure the greater as a foot-rule can measure a pyramid, there would be finality in universal suffrage. As it is, the political problem remains unsolved.
  • #16

• Democracy substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few.
  • #17

• He who confuses political liberty with freedom and political equality with similarity has never thought for five minutes about either.
  • #23

• Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.
  • #25

• The duke inquires contemptuously whether his gamekeeper is the equal of the Astronomer Royal; but he insists that they shall both be hanged equally if they murder him.
  • #26

• Where equality is undisputed, so also is subordination.
  • #28

• A fool's brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry.
  • #32

• The best brought-up children are those who have seen their parents as they are. Hypocrisy is not the parent's first duty.
  • #33

• Every fool believes what his teachers tell him, and calls his credulity science or morality as confidently as his father called it divine revelation.
  • #39

• No man can be a pure specialist without being in the strict sense an idiot.
  • #41

• The man who has graduated from the flogging block at Eton to the bench from which he sentences the garrotter to be flogged is the same social product as the garrotter who has been kicked by his father and cuffed by his mother until he has grown strong enough to throttle and rob the rich citizen whose money he desires.
  • #55

• Criminals do not die by the hands of the law. They die by the hands of other men.
  • #57

• When a man wants to murder a tiger he calls it sport: when the tiger wants to murder him he calls it ferocity. The distinction between Crime and Justice is no greater.
  • #62

• It is not necessary to replace a guillotined criminal: it is necessary to replace a guillotined social system.
  • #65

• There are no perfectly honorable men; but every true man has one main point of honor and a few minor ones.
  • #68

• Beware of the man whose god is in the skies.
  • #83

• Self-denial is not a virtue: it is only the effect of prudence on rascality.
  • #87

• Obedience simulates subordination as fear of the police simulates honesty.
  • #88

• Disobedience, the rarest and most courageous of the virtues, is seldom distinguished from neglect, the laziest and commonest of the vices.
  • #89

• In a stupid nation the man of genius becomes a god: everybody worships him and nobody does his will.
  • #101

• Happiness and Beauty are by-products.
  • #102

• Riches and Art are spurious receipts for the production of Happiness and Beauty.
  • #104

• He who desires a lifetime of happiness with a beautiful woman desires to enjoy the taste of wine by keeping his mouth always full of it.
  • #105

• The man with a toothache thinks everyone happy whose teeth are sound. The poverty stricken man makes the same mistake about the rich man.
  • #107

• The more a man possesses over and above what he uses, the more careworn he becomes.
  • #108

• In an ugly and unhappy world the richest man can purchase nothing but ugliness and unhappiness.
  • #110

• No elaboration of physical or moral accomplishment can atone for the sin of parasitism.
  • #116

• The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
  • #124

• Reason enslaves all whose minds are not strong enough to master her.
  • #125

• Decency is Indecency's Conspiracy of Silence.
  • #126

• Men are wise in proportion, not to their experience, but to their capacity for experience. If we could learn from mere experience, the stones of London would be wiser than its wisest men.
  • #127-128

• No age or condition is without its heroes. The least incapable general in a nation is its Cæsar, the least imbecile statesman its Solon, the least confused thinker its Socrates, the least commonplace poet its Shakespeare.
  • #136

• The roulette table pays nobody except him that keeps it. Nevertheless a passion for gaming is common, though a passion for keeping roulette tables is unknown.
  • #149

• The reformer for whom the world is not good enough finds himself shoulder to shoulder with him that is not good enough for the world.
  • #158

• Youth, which is forgiven everything, forgives itself nothing: age, which forgives itself everything, is forgiven nothing.
  • #160

• Do not mistake your objection to defeat for an objection to fighting, your objection to being a slave for an objection to slavery, your objection to not being as rich as your neighbor for an objection to poverty. The cowardly, the insubordinate, and the envious share your objections.
  • #162

• Those who understand evil pardon it.
  • #167

• When a heretic wishes to avoid martyrdom he speaks of "Orthodoxy, True and False" and demonstrates that the True is his heresy.
  • #172

• If you begin by sacrificing yourself to those you love, you will end by hating those to whom you have sacrificed yourself.
  • #179

Major Barbara (1905)

Brave and resolute men, when they are rascals, will not risk their skins for the good of humanity, and, when they are sympathetic enough to care for humanity, abhor murder, and never commit it until their consciences are outraged beyond endurance. The remedy is, then, simply not to outrage their consciences.

• I exclude the hypothesis of complete originality on [Charles] Lever's part, because a man can no more be completely original in that sense than a tree can grow out of air.
  • Preface

• The greatest of evils and the worst of crimes is poverty.
  • Preface

• The faults of the burglar are the qualities of the financier: the manners and habits of a duke would cost a city clerk his situation.
  • Preface

• It is quite useless to declare that all men are born free if you deny that they are born good. Guarantee a man's goodness and his liberty will take care of itself. To guarantee his freedom on condition that you approve of his moral character is formally to abolish all freedom whatsoever, as every man's liberty is at the mercy of a moral indictment which any fool can trump up against everyone who violates custom, whether as a prophet or as a rascal.
  • Preface

• Society, with all its prisons and bayonets and whips and ostracisms and starvations, is powerless in the face of the Anarchist who is prepared to sacrifice his own life in the battle with it. Our natural safety from the cheap and devastating explosives which every Russian student can make ... lies in the fact that brave and resolute men, when they are rascals, will not risk their skins for the good of humanity, and, when they are sympathetic enough to care for humanity, abhor murder, and never commit it until their consciences are outraged beyond endurance. The remedy is, then, simply not to outrage their consciences.
  • Preface

• I can't talk religion to a man with bodily hunger in his eyes.
  • Act II

• You cannot have power for good without having power for evil too. Even mother's milk nourishes murderers as well as heroes.

• Undershaft: You have made for yourself something that you call a morality or a religion or what not. It doesn't fit the facts. Well, scrap it. Scrap it and get one that does fit. That is what is wrong with the world at present. It scraps its obsolete steam engines and dynamos; but it wont scrap its old prejudices and its old moralities and its old religions and its old political constitutions. Whats the result? In machinery it does very well; but in morals and religion and politics it is working at a loss that brings it nearer bankruptcy every year.

• Cusins: Call you poverty a crime?
  Undershaft: The worst of crimes. All the other crimes are virtues beside it: all the other dishonors are chivalry itself by comparison. Poverty blights whole cities; spreads horrible pestilences; strikes dead the very souls of all who come within sight, sound or smell of it. What you call crime is nothing: a murder here and a theft there, a blow now and a curse then: what do they matter? they are only the accidents and illnesses of life: there are not fifty genuine professional criminals in London. But there are millions of poor people, abject people, dirty people, ill fed, ill clothed people. They poison us morally and physically: they kill the happiness of society: they force us to do away with our own liberties and to organize unnatural cruelties for fear they should rise against us and drag us down into their abyss. Only fools fear crime: we all fear poverty.

• Undershaft: My religion? Well, my dear, I am a Millionaire. That is my religion.
  • Act II

• You have learnt something. That always feels at first as if you had lost something.
  • Act III

• It is not the sale of my soul that troubles me: I have sold it too often to care about that. I have sold it for a professorship. I have sold it for an income. ... What is all human conduct but the daily and hourly sale of our souls for trifles?

• He knows nothing; and he thinks he knows everything. That points clearly to a political career.

John Bull's Other Island (1907)

• A healthy nation is as unconscious of its nationality as a healthy man of his bones. But if you break a nation's nationality it will think of nothing else but getting it set again.
  • Preface

• You cannot be a hero without being a coward.
  • Preface

• What really flatters a man is that you think him worth flattering.

• My way of joking is to tell the truth. It's the funniest joke in the world.
  • Act II

Getting Married (1908)

Full text online

Religion is a great force — the only real motive force in the world; but what you fellows don't understand is that you must get at a man through his own religion and not through yours.

• There is no subject on which more dangerous nonsense is talked and thought than marriage. If the mischief stopped at talking and thinking it would be bad enough; but it goes further, into disastrous anarchical action. Because our marriage law is inhuman and unreasonable to the point of downright abomination, the bolder and more rebellious spirits form illicit unions, defiantly sending cards round to their friends announcing what they have done. Young women come to me and ask me whether I think they ought to consent to marry the man they have decided to live with; and they are perplexed and astonished when I, who am supposed (heaven knows why!) to have the most advanced views attainable on the subject, urge them on no account to compromise themselves without the security of an authentic wedding ring.
  • Preface

• Home life as we understand it is no more natural to us than a cage is natural to a cockatoo.
  • Preface

• When two people are under the influence of the most violent, most insane, most delusive, and most transient of passions, they are required to swear that they will remain in that excited, abnormal, and exhausting condition continuously until death do them part.
  • Preface

• Plato long ago pointed out the importance of being governed by men with sufficient sense of responsibility and comprehension of public duties to be very reluctant to undertake the work of governing.
  • Preface

• Love is an appetite which, like all other appetites, is destroyed for the moment by its gratification.
  • Preface

• Never forget that if you leave your law to judges and your religion to bishops, you will presently find yourself without either law or religion.
  • Preface

• Journalists are too poorly paid in this country to know anything that is fit for publication.
  • Preface

• Monogamy has a sentimental basis which is quite distinct from the political one of equal numbers of the sexes. Equal numbers in the sexes are quite compatible with a change of partners every day or every hour. Physically there is nothing to distinguish human society from the farm-yard except that children are more troublesome and costly than chickens and calves, and that men and women are not so completely enslaved as farm stock. Accordingly, the people whose conception of marriage is a farm-yard or slave-quarter conception are always more or less in a panic lest the slightest relaxation of the marriage laws should utterly demoralize society; whilst those to whom marriage is a matter of more highly evolved sentiments and needs (sometimes said to be distinctively human, though birds and animals in a state of freedom evince them quite as touchingly as we) are much more liberal, knowing as they do that monogamy will take care of itself provided the parties are free enough, and that promiscuity is a product of slavery and not of liberty.
  • Preface: "The Personal Sentimental Basis of Monogamy"

• The secret of forgiving everything is to understand nothing.
  • Leo

• Nothing is more dreadful than a husband who keeps telling you everything he thinks, and always wants to know what you think.
  • The Bishop

• All progress means war with Society.
  • The Bishop

• The whole strength of England lies in the fact that the enormous majority of the English people are snobs.
  • Hotchkiss

• You don't learn to hold your own in the world by standing on guard, but by attacking, and getting well hammered yourself.
  • Mrs. George

• I happen, like Napoleon, to prefer Mohammedanism. [Mrs George, associating Mohammedanism with polygamy, looks at him with quick suspicion]. I believe the whole British Empire will adopt a reformed Mohammedanism before the end of the century. The character of Mahomet is congenial to me. I admire him, and share his views of life to a considerable extent.
  • Hotchkiss

• Religion is a great force — the only real motive force in the world; but what you fellows don't understand is that you must get at a man through his own religion and not through yours. Instead of facing that fact, you persist in trying to convert all men to your own little sect, so that you can use it against them afterwards. You are all missionaries and proselytizers trying to uproot the native religion from your neighbor's flowerbeds and plant your own in its place. You would rather let a child perish in ignorance than have it taught by a rival sectary. You can talk to me of the quintessential equality of coal merchants and British officers; and yet you can't see the quintessential equality of all the religions.
  • Hotchkiss

1910s

• Why was I born with such contemporaries?
  • The Dark Lady of the Sonnets, Preface (1910)

• A part of eugenic politics would finally land us in an extensive use of the lethal chamber. A great many people would have to be put out of existence simply because it wastes other people's time to look after them."
  • Shaw's Lecture to the London's Eugenics Education Society, The Daily Express, (March 4, 1910), quoted in Modernism and the Culture of Efficiency: Ideology and Fiction, Evelyn Cobley, University of Toronto Press (2009) p. 159

• A critic recently described me, with deadly acuteness, as having 'a kindly dislike of my fellow-creatures.' Perhaps dread would have been nearer the mark than dislike; for man is the only animal of which I am thoroughly and cravenly afraid.
  • As quoted in George Bernard Shaw, his life and works: a critical biography (authorised), Archibald Henderson, Stewart & Kidd (1911), Chapter VII (The Art Critic), pp. 201-202

• The word morality, if we met it in the Bible, would surprise us as much as the word telephone or motor car.
  • Fanny's First Play, Preface (1911)

• That proves it's not by Shaw, because all Shaw's characters are himself: mere puppets stuck up to spout Shaw.
  • Fanny's First Play, Epilogue

• As long as I have a want, I have a reason for living. Satisfaction is death.
  • Overruled (1912)

• Any public committee man who tries to pack the moral cards in the interest of his own notions is guilty of corruption and impertinence. The business of a public library is not to supply the public with the books the committee thinks good for the public, but to supply the public with the books the public wants. ... Censorship ends in logical completeness when nobody is allowed to read any books except the books that nobody can read. But as the ratepayer is mostly a coward and a fool in these difficult matters, and the committee is quite sure that it can succeed where the Roman Catholic Church has made its index expurgatorius the laughing-stock of the world, censorship will rage until it reduces itself to absurdity; and even then the best books will be in danger still.
  • As quoted in "Literary Censorship in England" in Current Opinion, Vol. 55, No. 5 (November 1913), p. 378; this has sometimes appeared on the internet in paraphrased form as "Censorship ends in logical completeness when nobody is allowed to read any books except the books that nobody reads"

• Well, I tell you again to get rid of your Constitution. But I suppose you won't do it. You have a good president and you have a bad Constitution, and the bad Constitution gets the better of the good President all the time. The end of it will be is that you might as well have an English Prime Minister.
  • Newsreel interview by George Bernard Shaw entitled "Various Scenes with George Bernard Shaw," Fox Movietone Newsreel (1933), referring to Franklin D. Roosevelt's presidency

• Custom will reconcile people to any atrocity; and fashion will drive them to acquire any custom.
  • Killing For Sport, Preface (1914)

• All great truths begin as blasphemies.
  • Annajanska (1919)

• You'll never have a quiet world till you knock the patriotism out of the human race.
  • O'Flaherty V.C. (1919)

Misalliance (1910)

It is more dangerous to be a great prophet or poet than to promote twenty companies for swindling simple folk out of their savings.

• It is more dangerous to be a great prophet or poet than to promote twenty companies for swindling simple folk out of their savings.
  • Preface

• Optimistic lies have such immense therapeutic value that a doctor who cannot tell them convincingly has mistaken his profession.
  • Preface

• A perpetual holiday is a good working definition of Hell.

• I like a bit of a mongrel myself, whether it's a man or a dog; they're the best for every day.
  • Episode I

• If parents would only realize how they bore their children!
  • Episode I

A Treatise on Parents and Children (1910)

• When will we realize that the fact that we can become accustomed to anything, however disgusting at first, makes it necessary to examine carefully everything we have become accustomed to.

• Death is for many of us the gate of hell; but we are inside on the way out, not outside on the way in.

• A nation should always be healthily rebellious; but the king or prime minister has yet to be found who will make trouble by cultivating that side of the national spirit. A child should begin to assert itself early, and shift for itself more and more not only in washing and dressing itself, but in opinions and conduct; yet as nothing is so exasperating and so unlovable as an uppish child, it is useless to expect parents and schoolmasters to inculcate this uppishness. Such unamiable precepts as Always contradict an authoritative statement, Always return a blow, Never lose a chance of a good fight, When you are scolded for a mistake ask the person who scolds you whether he or she supposes you did it on purpose, and follow the question with a blow or an insult or some other unmistakable expression of resentment, Remember that the progress of the world depends on your knowing better than your elders, are just as important as those of The Sermon on the Mount; but no one has yet seen them written up in letters of gold in a schoolroom or nursery.

• You are so careful of your boy's morals, knowing how troublesome they may be, that you keep him away from the Venus of Milo only to find him in the arms of the scullery maid or someone much worse. You decide that the Hermes of Praxiteles and Wagner's Tristan are not suited for young girls; and your daughter marries somebody appallingly unlike either Hermes or Tristan solely to escape from your parental protection. You have not stifled a single passion nor averted a single danger: you have depraved the passions by starving them, and broken down all the defences which so effectively protect children brought up in freedom.

• The secret of being miserable is to have leisure to bother about whether you are happy or not. The cure for it is occupation, because occupation means pre-occupation; and the pre-occupied person is neither happy nor unhappy, but simply alive and active, which is pleasanter than any happiness until you are tired of it.

The Doctor's Dilemma (1911)

Full text online at Project Gutenberg

• Do not try to live for ever. You will not succeed.
  • Preface

• No man who is occupied in doing a very difficult thing, and doing it well, ever loses his self-respect.
  • Preface

• Attention and activity lead to mistakes as well as to successes; but a life spent in making mistakes is not only more honorable but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.
  • Preface

• All professions are conspiracies against the laity.
  • Act I

• I don't believe in morality. I'm a disciple of Bernard Shaw.
  • Act III

• Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh.
  • Act V

• Chloroform has done a lot of mischief. It's enabled every fool to be a surgeon.

Pygmalion (1912)

Women upset everything. When you let them into your life, you find that the woman is driving at one thing and you're driving at another.

What is life but a series of inspired follies? The difficulty is to find them to do. Never lose a chance: it doesn't come every day.

• It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman hate or despise him.
  • Preface

• The English have no respect for their language, and will not teach their children to speak it.
  • Preface

• He ain't a copper just look at 'is boots!
  • Act I

• Ah-ah-ah-ah-ow-ow-oo-oo!!! I ain't dirty: I washed me face and hands afore I come, I did!
  • Act II

• Women upset everything. When you let them into your life, you find that the woman is driving at one thing and you're driving at another.
  • Act II

• What is life but a series of inspired follies? The difficulty is to find them to do. Never lose a chance: it doesn't come every day.
  • Act II

• I wouldn't have ate it, only I'm too lady-like to take it out of my mouth.
  • Act II

• I don't want to talk grammar, I want to talk like a lady.
  • Act II

• I ask you, what am I? I'm one of the undeserving poor: thats what I am. Think of what that means to a man.
  • Act II

• I aint such a mug as to put up my children to all I know myself.
  • Act II

• Walk! Not bloody likely. I am going in a taxi.
  • Act III

• I heard your prayers Thank God it's all over!
  • Act IV

• You see, lots of the real people can't do it at all: they're such fools that they think style comes by nature to people in their position; and so they never learn. There's always something professional about doing a thing superlatively well.

• Time enough to think of the future when you haven't any future to think of.

• I have to live for others and not for myself; that's middle-class morality.
  • Act V

• Independence? That's middle-class blasphemy. We are all dependent on one another, every soul of us on earth.
  • Act V

Androcles and the Lion (1913)

• The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one. The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality of happiness, and by no means a necessity of life.
  • Preface, The importance of hell in the salvation scheme

• Revolutionary movements attract those who are not good enough for established institutions as well as those who are too good for them.

• Howbeit, Paul succeeded in stealing the image of Christ crucified for the figure-head of his Salvationist vessel, with its Adam posing as the natural man, its doctrine of original sin, and its damnation avoidable only by faith in the sacrifice of the cross. In fact, no sooner had Jesus knocked over the dragon of superstition than Paul boldly set it on its legs again in the name of Jesus.
  • Preface, Paul

The Technique of War (1917)

• He [the British taxpayer] must be taught that war is not precise or economical. It is almost inconceivably wasteful and extravagant. It burns the house to roast the pig, and even then seldom roasts him effectively..... waste is the law of modern war; and nothing is cheap on the battlefield except the lives of men...... Therefore, my taxpayer, resign yourself to this: that we may fight bravely, fight hard, fight long, fight cunningly, fight recklessly, fight in a hundred and fifty ways, but we cannot fight cheaply.
  • The Daily Chronicle on the 7 March 1917.

Heartbreak House (1919)

Full text online

• "He must be greatly changed. Has he attained the seventh degree of concentration?"
  • Captain Shotover, Act I

• "We know now that the soul is the body, and the body the soul. They tell us they are different because they want to persuade us that we can keep our souls if we let them make slaves of our bodies."
  • Ellie Dunn, Act II

• When your heart is broken, your boats are burned: nothing matters any more. It is the end of happiness and the beginning of peace.
  • Ellie Dunn, Act II

1920s

• The moment we face it frankly we are driven to the conclusion that the community has a right to put a price on the right to live in it ... If people are fit to live, let them live under decent human conditions. If they are not fit to live, kill them in a decent human way. Is it any wonder that some of us are driven to prescribe the lethal chamber as the solution for the hard cases which are at present made the excuse for dragging all the other cases down to their level, and the only solution that will create a sense of full social responsibility in modern populations?
  • As quoted in George Bernard Shaw's "Prefaces" in English Prisons Under Local Government, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, London: Longmans, Green & Co (1922) pp. 31-32

• It is difficult, if not impossible, for most people to think otherwise than in the fashion of their own period.
  • Preface to Saint Joan : A Chronicle Play In Six Scenes And An Epilogue (1923)

• Political necessities sometimes turn out to be political mistakes.
  • Saint Joan : A Chronicle Play In Six Scenes And An Epilogue (1923) - Full text online

• Scratch an Englishman and find a Protestant.
  • Saint Joan : A Chronicle Play In Six Scenes And An Epilogue (1923)

• God is on the side of the big battalions.
  • Saint Joan : A Chronicle Play In Six Scenes And An Epilogue (1923)

• Must then a Christ perish in torment in every age to save those that have no imagination?
  • Saint Joan : A Chronicle Play In Six Scenes And An Epilogue (1923)

• The Italians must allow us to slaughter the Momands, because, if we do not kill the warlike hillmen, they will kill us. And we must allow the Italians to slaughter the Danakils for the same reason.
  • Quote about Italy's 1935 invasion of Ethiopia in Socialism and Superior Brains: The Political Thought of Bernard Shaw by Gareth Griffith (1993) p. 267.

• The Nazi movement is in many respects one which has my warmest sympathy.
  • As Quoted in London Morning Post, (Dec. 3, 1925)

• Some of the things Mussolini has done, and some that he is threatening to do go further in the direction of Socialism than the English Labour Party could yet venture if they were in power.
  • Letter from G. Bernard Shaw to a friend, "Bernard Shaw's Defence of Mussolini," (Feb. 7, 1927)

• [Mussolini was] farther to the Left in his political opinions than any of his socialist rivals.
  • As quoted in, Socialism and Superior Brains: The Political Thought of Bernard Shaw, Gareth Griffith, Routledge, (2002) p. 253, Manchester Guardian (1927)

• Socialists must be in favor of an aristocratic form of government. We must have the best men for the job . . . In the dictator you must have a man who has not only the power to govern but the force of character to impose himself as dictator whether you like him or not.
  • "Socialism urged to find dictator," Berkeley Daily Gazette (Nov. 30, 1927)

• Our natural dispositions may be good; but we have been badly brought up, and are full of anti-social personal ambitions and prejudices and snobberies. Had we not better teach our children to be better citizens than ourselves? We are not doing that at present. The Russians are. That is my last word. Think over it.
  • The Apple Cart (1928) Preface

• One man that has a mind and knows it can always beat ten men who haven't and don't.
  • The Apple Cart (1928), Act I

• God help England if she had no Scots to think for her!
  • The Apple Cart (1928), Act II
• We should refuse to tolerate poverty as a social institution not because the poor are the salt of the earth, but because 'the poor in a lump are bad'.
  • The Intelligent Woman's Guide: To Socialism and Capitalism. p. 219.
• We have to confess it: Capitalist mankind in the lump is detestable. ...Both rich and poor are really hateful in themselves. For my part I hate the poor and look forward eagerly to their extermination. I pity the rich a little, but am equally bent on their extermination. The working classes, the ruling classes, the professional classes, the propertied classes, the ruling classes, are each more odious than the other: they have no right to live: I should despair if I did not know that they will all die presently, and that there is no need on earth why they should be replaced by people like themselves... And yet I am not in the least a misanthrope. I am a person of normal affections
  • The Intelligent Woman's Guide: To Socialism and Capitalism. p. 456.

• Under Socialism, you would not be allowed to be poor. You would be forcibly fed, clothed, lodged, taught, and employed whether you liked it or not. If it were discovered that you had not character and industry enough to be worth all this trouble, you might possibly be executed in a kindly manner; but whilst you were permitted to live, you would have to live well.
  • The Intelligent Woman's Guide: To Socialism and Capitalism, New York: NY, Brentano (1928) p. 670.

• It is far more likely that by the time nationalization has become the rule, and private enterprise the exception, Socialism (which is really rather a bad name for the business) will be spoken of, if at all, as a crazy religion held by a fanatical sect in that darkest of dark ages, the nineteenth century. Already, indeed, I am told that Socialism has had its day, and that the sooner we stop talking nonsense about it and set to work, like the practical people we are, to nationalize the coal mines and complete a national electrification scheme, the better. And I, who said forty years ago that we should have had Socialism already but for the Socialists, am quite willing to drop the name if dropping it will help me to get the thing. What I meant by my jibe at the Socialists of the eighteen-eighties was that nothing is ever done, and much is prevented, by people who do not realize that they cannot do everything at once.
  • The Intelligent Woman's Guide To Socialism, Capitalism, Sovietism, and Fascism (1928)

• Perhaps the greatest social service that can be rendered by anybody to the country and to mankind is to bring up a family. But here again, because there is nothing to sell, there is a very general disposition to regard a married woman's work as no work at all, and to take it as a matter of course that she should not be paid for it.
  • The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism and Capitalism, Chapter 8 (1928)

• Women are not angels. They are as foolish as men in many ways; but they have had to devote themselves to life whilst men have had to devote themselves to death; and that makes a vital difference in male and female religion. Women have been forced to fear whilst men have been forced to dare: the heroism of a woman is to nurse and protect life, and of a man to destroy it and court death.
  • The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism and Capitalism, Chapter 82 (1928)

• Well, of course, they notice you. You always hide just in the middle of the limelight.
  • Reply to T. E. Lawrence who complained of press attention.
  • Quoted by Harry Kessler in his diary, 14 November 1929

Back to Methuselah (1921)

I remember Lilith, who came before Adam and Eve. I was her darling as I am yours.

There are no secrets except the secrets that keep themselves.

Everything happens to everybody sooner or later if there is time enough.

You use a glass mirror to see your face: you use works of art to see your soul.

They have redeemed themselves from their vileness, and turned away from their sins. Best of all, they are still not satisfied...

I can wait: waiting and patience mean nothing to the eternal. I gave the woman the greatest of gifts: curiosity. By that her seed has been saved from my wrath; for I also am curious; and I have waited always to see what they will do tomorrow.

Of Life only is there no end; and though of its million starry mansions many are empty and many still unbuilt, and though its vast domain is as yet unbearably desert, my seed shall one day fill it and master its matter to its uttermost confines. And for what may be beyond, the eyesight of Lilith is too short. It is enough that there is a beyond.

Full text online

• In truth, mankind cannot be saved from without, by schoolmasters or any other sort of masters: it can only be lamed and enslaved by them. It is said that if you wash a cat it will never again wash itself. This may or may not be true: what is certain is that if you teach a man anything he will never learn it; and if you cure him of a disease he will be unable to cure himself the next time it attacks him.
  • Is there any hope in education?

• People will have their miracles, their stories, their heroes and heroines and saints and martyrs and divinities to exercise their gifts of affection, admiration, wonder, and worship, and their Judases and devils to enable them to be angry and yet feel that they do well to be angry. Every one of these legends is the common heritage of the human race; and there is only one inexorable condition attached to their healthy enjoyment, which is that no one shall believe them literally. The reading of stories and delighting in them made Don Quixote a gentleman: the believing them literally made him a madman who slew lambs instead of feeding them.
  • A Touchstone For Dogma

• I hear you say "Why?" Always "Why?" You see things; and you say "Why?" But I dream things that never were; and I say "Why not?"
  • The Serpent, in Pt. I : In the Beginning, Act I
  • This quote is sometimes misattributed to Robert F. Kennedy. It is often paraphrased slightly in a few different ways, including: You see things as they are and ask, "Why?" I dream things as they never were and ask, "Why not?"

• I worship you, Eve. I must have something to worship. Something quite different to myself, like you. There must be something greater than the snake.
  • The Serpent, in Pt I : In the Beginning

• Everything is possible: everything. Listen. I am old. I am the old serpent, older than Adam, older than Eve. I remember Lilith, who came before Adam and Eve. I was her darling as I am yours. She was alone: there was no man with her. She saw death as you saw it when the fawn fell; and she knew then that she must find out how to renew herself and cast the skin like me. She had a mighty will: she strove and strove and willed and willed for more moons than there are leaves on all the trees of the garden. Her pangs were terrible: her groans drove sleep from Eden. She said it must never be again: that the burden of renewing life was past bearing: that it was too much for one. And when she cast the skin, lo! there was not one new Lilith but two: one like herself, the other like Adam. You were the one: Adam was the other.
  • The Serpent, in Pt. I, Act I

• Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire; you will what you imagine; and at last you create what you will.
  • The Serpent, in Pt. I, Act I

• Conceive. That is the word that means both the beginning in imagination and the end in creation.
  • The Serpent, in Pt. I, Act I

• Life must not cease. That comes before everything. It is silly to say you do not care. You do care. It is that care that will prompt your imagination; inflame your desires; make your will irresistible; and create out of nothing.
  • The Serpent, in Pt. I, Act I

• I am very subtle; but Man is deeper in his thought than I am. The woman knows that there is no such thing as nothing: the man knows that there is no such day as tomorrow. I do well to worship them.
  • The Serpent, in Pt. I, Act I

• THE SERPENT: The voice in the garden is your own voice.
  ADAM: It is; and it is not. It is something greater than me: I am only a part of it.
  EVE: The Voice does not tell me not to kill you. Yet I do not want you to die before me. No voice is needed to make me feel that.
  ADAM [throwing his arm round her shoulder with an expression of anguish]: Oh no: that is plain without any voice. There is something that holds us together, something that has no word —
  THE SERPENT: Love. Love. Love.
  ADAM: That is too short a word for so long a thing.
  • The Serpent, Adam, and Eve, in Pt. I, Act I

• I make no vows. I take my chance. ... It means that I fear certainty as you fear uncertainty. It means that nothing is certain but uncertainty. If I bind the future I bind my will. If I bind my will I strangle creation.
  • The Serpent, in Pt. I, Act I

• You can feel nothing but a torment, and believe nothing but a lie. You will not raise your head to look at all the miracles of life that surround you; but you will run ten miles to see a fight or a death.
  • Eve to Cain, in Pt. I, Act II

• Your father is a fool skin deep; but you are a fool to your very marrow.
  • Eve to Cain, in Pt. I, Act II

• Any sort of plain speaking is better than the nauseous sham good fellowship our democratic public men get up for shop use.
  • Franklyn, in Pt. II : The Gospel of the Brothers Barnabas

• There are no secrets except the secrets that keep themselves.
  • Confucius, in Pt. III : The Thing Happens

• Everything happens to everybody sooner or later if there is time enough.
  • Pt. V : As Far as Thought Can Reach

• Silence is the perfect expression of scorn.
  • Pt. V

• The worst cliques are those which consist of one man.
  • Pt. V

• Life is not meant to be easy, my child but take courage: it can be delightful.
  • Pt. V; see also the later phrasing of Malcolm Fraser, "life wasn't meant to be easy"

• THE HE-ANCIENT: When a thing is funny, search it for a hidden truth
  STREPHON: Yes; and take all the fun out of it.
  • Pt. V

• Art is the magic mirror you make to reflect your invisible dreams in visible pictures. You use a glass mirror to see your face: you use works of art to see your soul. But we who are older use neither glass mirrors nor works of art. We have a direct sense of life. When you gain that you will put aside your mirrors and statues, your toys and your dolls.
  • The She-Ancient, in Pt. V

• When the master has come to do everything through the slave, the slave becomes his master, since he cannot live without him.
  • The He-Ancient, in Pt. V

• Love is a simple thing and a deep thing: it is an act of life and not an illusion. Art is an illusion.
  • Acis, in Pt. V

• Even a vortex is a vortex in something. You can't have a whirlpool without water; and you can't have a vortex without gas, or molecules or atoms or ions or electrons or something, not nothing.
  • Acis, in Pt. V

• The body was the slave of the vortex; but the slave has become the master; and we must free ourselves from that tyranny. It is this stuff [indicating her body], this flesh and blood and bone and all the rest of it, that is intolerable. Even prehistoric man dreamed of what he called an astral body, and asked who would deliver him from the body of this death.
  • The She-Ancient, in Pt. V

• I am justified. For I chose wisdom and the knowledge of good and evil; and now there is no evil; and wisdom and good are one. It is enough.
  • The Serpent, in Pt. V

• They have accepted the burden of eternal life. They have taken the agony from birth; and their life does not fail them even in the hour of their destruction.
  • Lilith, in Pt. V

• I had patience with them for many ages: they tried me very sorely. They did terrible things: they embraced death, and said that eternal life was a fable. I stood amazed at the malice and destructiveness of the things I had made...
  • Lilith, in Pt. V

• They have redeemed themselves from their vileness, and turned away from their sins. Best of all, they are still not satisfied: the impulse I gave them in that day when I sundered myself in twain and launched Man and Woman on the earth still urges them: after passing a million goals they press on to the goal of redemption from the flesh, to the vortex freed from matter, to the whirlpool in pure intelligence that, when the world began, was a whirlpool in pure force.

• I can wait: waiting and patience mean nothing to the eternal. I gave the woman the greatest of gifts: curiosity. By that her seed has been saved from my wrath; for I also am curious; and I have waited always to see what they will do tomorrow.

• I say, let them dread, of all things, stagnation; for from the moment I, Lilith, lose hope and faith in them, they are doomed. In that hope and faith I have let them live for a moment; and in that moment I have spared them many times. But mightier creatures than they have killed hope and faith, and perished from the earth; and I may not spare them for ever. I am Lilith: I brought life into the whirlpool of force, and compelled my enemy, Matter, to obey a living soul. But in enslaving Life's enemy I made him Life's master; for that is the end of all slavery; and now I shall see the slave set free and the enemy reconciled, the whirlpool become all life and no matter. And because these infants that call themselves ancients are reaching out towards that, I will have patience with them still; though I know well that when they attain it they shall become one with me and supersede me, and Lilith will be only a legend and a lay that has lost its meaning. Of Life only is there no end; and though of its million starry mansions many are empty and many still unbuilt, and though its vast domain is as yet unbearably desert, my seed shall one day fill it and master its matter to its uttermost confines. And for what may be beyond, the eyesight of Lilith is too short. It is enough that there is a beyond.
  • Lilith, in Pt. V

1930s

• No public man in these islands ever believes that the Bible means what it says: he is always convinced that it says what he means.
  • Our Theatres In The Nineties (1930)

• I have defined the 100 per cent American as 99 per cent an idiot.
  • New York Times (19 December 1930) remarks on Sinclair Lewis receiving the Nobel Prize

• Impression of Gandhi! You might as well ask one to give his impression of the Himalayas.
  • When asked about his impression on Gandhi (1931), as quoted in D. G. Tendulkar, Mahatma: Life of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1952), vol. 3, p. 166.

• I object to all punishment whatsoever. I don't want to punish anybody, but there are an extraordinary number of people who I want to kill. Not in any unkind or personal spirit. But it must be evident to all of you, you must all know have a dozen (1/12) people at least, who are no use in this world; who are more trouble than they are worth. And I think it would be a good thing to make everybody come before a properly appointed board just as he might come before the income tax commissioners and say every 5 years or every 7 years, just put them there, and say, sir or madam, now will you be kind enough to justify your existence? If you can’t justify your existence; if you’re not pulling your weight in the social boat; if you are not producing as much as you consume or perhaps a little more, then clearly we cannot use the big organization of our society for the purpose of keeping you alive, because your life does not benefit us, and it can’t be of very much use to yourself.
  • "George Bernard Shaw reopens capital punishment controversy", Paramount British Pictures (March 5, 1931)

• I am afraid we must make the world honest before we can honestly tell our children that honesty is the best policy.
  • "Rungs of the Ladder", BBC Radio broadcast (11 July 1932)

• An American has no sense of privacy. He does not know what it means. There is no such thing in the country.
  • Speech in New York (11 April 1933)

• You in America should trust to that volcanic political instinct which I have divined in you.
  • Speech at New York (11 April 1933)

• Hitler is a very remarkable man, a very able man... What Hitler should have done was not to drive the Jews out, what he ought to have said was, 'I will tolerate the Jews to any extent on condition that no Jew marries a Jewess, on condition that he marries a German.'
  • From a lecture before the Fabian Society in London called "The Politics of Unpolitical Animals" (23 November 1933), as cited in "Shaw Heaps Praise upon the Dictators: While Parliaments Get Nowhere, He Says, Mussolini and Stalin Do Things," New York Times (10 December 1933)

• Until you have socialism you will never have State solidity, because, as we know, if you have private property you will immediately split your stake. You get the class conflict, the class struggle, the confrontation of interests between the proprietors and between the proletariat; and, therefore, you have something that is crumbling, that is divided against itself.
  • From a lecture before the Fabian Society in London called "The Politics of Unpolitical Animals" (23 November 1933), as cited in "Shaw Heaps Praise upon the Dictators: While Parliaments Get Nowhere, He Says, Mussolini and Stalin Do Things," New York Times (10 December 1933)

• As a red hot Communist I am in favour of fascism. The only drawback to Sir Oswald's movement is that it is not quite British enough.
  • From "The Blackshirt Challenge", News Chronicle (17 January 1934), as cited in Gareth Griffith Socialism and Superior Brains: The Political Thought of Bernard Shaw, Routledge (1993) p. 264.

• Mussolini, Kemal, Pilsudski, Hitler and the rest can all depend on me to judge them by their ability to deliver the goods and not by... comfortable notions of freedom. Stalin has delivered the goods to an extent that seemed impossible ten years ago; and I take off my hat to him accordingly.
  • As quoted in "Stalin-Wells Talk: The Verbatim Report and A Discussion", G.B. Shaw, J.M. Keynes et al., London, The New Statesman and Nation, (1934) p. 47. Also reported in Political Pilgrams: Western Intellectuals in Search of the Good Society, Paul Hollander, New Brunswick, N.J: Transaction Publishers (1998) p. 169

• I appeal to the chemists to discover a humane gas that will kill instantly and painlessly. In short, a gentlemanly gas – deadly by all means, but humane not cruel.
  • The Listener (BBC magazine) (February 1934)

• Now take Stalin himself. He is 'neither duke nor peer', not a king, not a chancellor, not a dictator, not a Prime Minister, not an archbishop, not entitled to salutes enforced by youths in coloured shirts, but simply secretary of the supreme controlling organ of the hierarchy, subject to dismissal at five minutes' notice if he does not give satisfaction. This position he has attained through the survival of the fittest, and has held through the years of the most appalling vicissitudes that ever attended the birth pangs of a new civilisation.
  • As quoted in "Stalin-Wells Talk: The Verbatim Report and A Discussion", G.B. Shaw, J.M. Keynes et al., London, The New Statesman and Nation, (1934) p. 40

• Stalin has exiled Trotsky and become the Pontifex Maximus of the new Russo-Catholic Church of Communism on two grounds. First, he is a practical Nationalist statesman recognizing that Russia is a big enough handful for mortal rulers to tackle without taking on the rest of the world as well.... Second, Stalin, inflexible as to his final aim, is a compete opportunist as to the means.
  • As quoted in "Stalin-Wells Talk: The Verbatim Report and A Discussion", G.B. Shaw, J.M. Keynes et al., London, The New Statesman and Nation, (1934) p. 26

• The news from Germany is the very best news that we have had since the war. Ever since 1918 we, like all the other powers, have been behaving just as badly as we possibly could. Well now, when Germany fell, they want and they sat on Germany's head and they kept sitting on Germany's head, although it was quite preposterous, quite evident to any sensible persona, that they couldn't go on like that forever. Then there came a very intelligent gentleman named Adolf Hitler and he, knowing perfectly well that the powers would not fight, he snapped his fingers at the Treaty of Versailles. Just exactly as if we in England had been in the same position. As if the powers had beaten us and sat on our head.
  • From an interview (1935), as cited in James Curran, Anthony Smith & Pauline Wingate, ed (1987). Impacts and Influences: Media Power in the Twentieth Century. Taylor & Francis. pp. 90-91. ISBN 978-0-416-00612-4. , George Bernard Shaw Speaks on Hitler and Germany 1935 (video)

• Then the first man who had the gumption to see that we might get up on our legs and defy all those old treaties, he would be the most popular man in England. There can be no peace in the world until there is peace between England, France, Germany, Russia, the United States and all the big powers of the West. Now take that home and think about it and don't be frightened any more about the Germans.
  • About the Treaty of Versailles (1935). George Bernard Shaw Speaks on Hitler and Germany 1935 (video)

• Dear Katharine Cornell: I don't think I was ever so astonished by a picture as I was by your photograph. Your success as Candida and something blonde and expansive about your name had created an ideal British Candida in my imagination. Fancy my feelings on seeing the photograph of a gorgeous dark lady from the cradle of the human race ... wherever that was ... Ceylon ... Sumatra ... Hilo ... or the southernmost corner of the Garden of Eden. If you look like that it doesn't matter a rap if you can act or not. Can you? Yours, breath bereaved, Bernard Shaw.
  • Letter to Katharine Cornell, c. 1936; as quoted in [https://archive.org/details/leadingladyworld00mose/page/187/mode/2up Leading Lady : The World and Theatre of Katharine Cornell (1978) by Tad Mosel, p. 187

• We ought to tackle the Jewish question by admitting the right of States to make eugenic experiments by weeding out any strains that they think undesirable, but insisting that they should do it as humanely as they can afford to, and not shock civilization by such misdemeanors as the expulsion and robbery of Einstein.
  • From a letter to Beatrice Webb (1938), as cited in Dan H. Laurence (ed) Bernard Shaw: Collected Letters 1926-1950, New York: Viking (1988), p. 493

On the Rocks (1933)

On the Rocks : A Political Comedy

Take the case of the extermination of Jesus Christ. No doubt there was a strong case for it. ... By every argument, legal, political, religious, customary, and polite, he was the most complete enemy of the society of his time ever brought to the bar.

I am the embodiment of a thought of God: I am the Word made flesh ... Beware how you kill a thought that is new to you. For that thought may be the foundation of the kingdom of God on earth.

• In this play a reference is made by a Chief of Police to the political necessity for killing people: a necessity so distressing to the statesmen and so terrifying to the common citizen that nobody except myself (as far as I know) has ventured to examine it directly on its own merits, although every Government is obliged to practise it on a scale varying from the execution of a single murderer to the slaughter of millions of quite innocent persons. Whilst assenting to these proceedings, and even acclaiming and celebrating them, we dare not tell ourselves what we are doing or why we are doing it; and so we call it justice or capital punishment or our duty to king and country or any other convenient verbal whitewash for what we instinctively recoil from as from a dirty job. These childish evasions are revolting. We must strip off the whitewash and find out what is really beneath it. Extermination must be put on a scientific basis if it is ever to be carried out humanely and apologetically as well as thoroughly.
  • Preface; Extermination
  • Ignoring the satirical elements of Shaw's rhetoric, and that he is presenting many arguments of sometimes questionable sincerity for the "humane" execution of criminals, the last sentence here has sometimes been misquoted as if it as part of an argument for exterminations for the sake of eugenics, by preceding it with a selected portion of a statement later in the essay: "If we desire a certain type of civilization, we must exterminate the sort of people who do not fit into it ... Extermination must be put on a scientific basis if it is ever to be carried out humanely and apologetically as well as thoroughly".

• In law we draw a line between the killing of human animals and non-human ones, setting the latter apart as brutes. This was founded on a general belief that humans have immortal souls and brutes none. Nowadays more and more people are refusing to make this distinction. They may believe in The Life Everlasting and The Life to Come; but they make no distinction between Man and Brute, because some of them believe that brutes have souls, whilst others refuse to believe that the physical materializations and personifications of The Life Everlasting are themselves everlasting. In either case the mystic distinction between Man and Brute vanishes; and the murderer pleading that though a rabbit should be killed for being mischievous he himself should be spared because he has an immortal soul and a rabbit has none is as hopelessly out of date as a gentleman duellist pleading his clergy. When the necessity for killing a dangerous human being arises, as it still does daily, the only distinction we make between a man and a snared rabbit is that we very quaintly provide the man with a minister of religion to explain to him that we are not killing him at all, but only expediting his transfer to an eternity of bliss.
  • Preface; The Sacredness of Human Life

• The extermination of what the exterminators call inferior races is as old as history. "Stone dead hath no fellow" said Cromwell when he tried to exterminate the Irish. "The only good nigger is a dead nigger" say the Americans of the Ku-Klux temperament. "Hates any man the thing he would not kill?" said Shylock naively. But we white men, as we absurdly call ourselves in spite of the testimony of our looking glasses, regard all differently colored folk as inferior species. Ladies and gentlemen class rebellious laborers with vermin. The Dominicans, the watchdogs of God, regarded the Albigenses as the enemies of God, just as Torquemada regarded the Jews as the murderers of God. All that is an old story: what we are confronted with now is a growing perception that if we desire a certain type of civilization and culture we must exterminate the sort of people who do not fit into it. There is a difference between the shooting at sight of aboriginal natives in the back blocks of Australia and the massacres of aristocrats in the terror which followed the foreign attacks on the French Revolution. The Australian gunman pots the aboriginal natives to satisfy his personal antipathy to a black man with uncut hair. But nobody in the French Republic had this feeling about Lavoisier, nor can any German Nazi have felt that way about Einstein. Yet Lavoisier was guillotined; and Einstein has had to fly for his life from Germany. It was silly to say that the Republic had no use for chemists; and no Nazi has stultified his party to the extent of saying that the new National Socialist Fascist State in Germany has no use for mathematician-physicists. The proposition is that aristocrats (Lavoisier's class) and Jews (Einstein's race) are unfit to enjoy the privilege of living in a modern society founded on definite principles of social welfare as distinguished from the old promiscuous aggregations crudely policed by chiefs who had no notion of social criticism and no time to invent it.
  • Preface; Previous Attempts Miss the Point.

• There have been summits of civilization at which heretics like Socrates, who was killed because he was wiser than his neighbors, have not been tortured, but ordered to kill themselves in the most painless manner known to their judges. But from that summit there was a speedy relapse into our present savagery.
  • Preface; Cruelty's Excuses

• I dislike cruelty, even cruelty to other people, and should therefore like to see all cruel people exterminated. But I should recoil with horror from a proposal to punish them. Let me illustrate my attitude by a very famous, indeed far too famous, example of the popular conception of criminal law as a means of delivering up victims to the normal popular lust for cruelty which has been mortified by the restraint imposed on it by civilization. Take the case of the extermination of Jesus Christ. No doubt there was a strong case for it. Jesus was from the point of view of the High Priest a heretic and an impostor. From the point of view of the merchants he was a rioter and a Communist. From the Roman Imperialist point of view he was a traitor. From the commonsense point of view he was a dangerous madman. From the snobbish point of view, always a very influential one, he was a penniless vagrant. From the police point of view he was an obstructor of thoroughfares, a beggar, an associate of prostitutes, an apologist of sinners, and a disparager of judges; and his daily companions were tramps whom he had seduced into vagabondage from their regular trades. From the point of view of the pious he was a Sabbath breaker, a denier of the efficacy of circumcision and the advocate of a strange rite of baptism, a gluttonous man and a winebibber. He was abhorrent to the medical profession as an unqualified practitioner who healed people by quackery and charged nothing for the treatment. He was not anti-Christ: nobody had heard of such a power of darkness then; but he was startlingly anti-Moses. He was against the priests, against the judiciary, against the military, against the city (he declared that it was impossible for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven), against all the interests, classes, principalities and powers, inviting everybody to abandon all these and follow him. By every argument, legal, political, religious, customary, and polite, he was the most complete enemy of the society of his time ever brought to the bar. He was guilty on every count of the indictment, and on many more that his accusers had not the wit to frame. If he was innocent then the whole world was guilty. To acquit him was to throw over civilization and all its institutions. History has borne out the case against him; for no State has ever constituted itself on his principles or made it possible to live according to his commandments: those States who have taken his name have taken it as an alias to enable them to persecute his followers more plausibly.
  It is not surprising that under these circumstances, and in the absence of any defence, the Jerusalem community and the Roman government decided to exterminate Jesus. They had just as much right to do so as to exterminate the two thieves who perished with him.
  • Preface, Leading Case of Jesus Christ

• All government is cruel; for nothing is so cruel as impunity.
  • Pilate, as portrayed in Preface, Difference Between Reader And Spectator

• I am no mere chance pile of flesh and bone: if I were only that, I should fall into corruption and dust before your eyes. I am the embodiment of a thought of God: I am the Word made flesh: that is what holds me together standing before you in the image of God. ... The Word is God. And God is within you. ... In so far as you know the truth you have it from my God, who is your heavenly father and mine. He has many names and his nature is manifold. ... It is by children who are wiser than their fathers, subjects who are wiser than their emperors, beggars and vagrants who are wiser than their priests, that men rise from being beasts of prey to believing in me and being saved. ... By their fruits ye shall know them. Beware how you kill a thought that is new to you. For that thought may be the foundation of the kingdom of God on earth.
  • Jesus, as portrayed in Preface, Difference Between Reader And Spectator

• The kingdom of God is striving to come. The empire that looks back in terror shall give way to the kingdom that looks forward with hope. Terror drives men mad: hope and faith give them divine wisdom. The men whom you fill with fear will stick at no evil and perish in their sin: the men whom I fill with faith shall inherit the earth. I say to you Cast out fear. Speak no more vain things to me about the greatness of Rome. ... You, standing for Rome, are the universal coward: I, standing for the kingdom of God, have braved everything, lost everything, and won an eternal crown.
  • Jesus, as portrayed in Preface, Difference Between Reader And Spectator

• Law is blind without counsel. The counsel men agree with is vain: it is only the echo of their own voices. A million echoes will not help you to rule righteously. But he who does not fear you and shews you the other side is a pearl of the greatest price. Slay me and you go blind to your damnation. The greatest of God's names is Counsellor; and when your Empire is dust and your name a byword among the nations the temples of the living God shall still ring with his praise as Wonderful! Counsellor! the Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace.
  • Jesus, as portrayed in Preface, Difference Between Reader And Spectator

• The last word remains with Christ and Handel; and this must stand as the best defence of Tolerance until a better man than I makes a better job of it.
  Put shortly and undramatically the case is that a civilization cannot progress without criticism, and must therefore, to save itself from stagnation and putrefaction, declare impunity for criticism. This means impunity not only for propositions which, however novel, seem interesting, statesmanlike, and respectable, but for propositions that shock the uncritical as obscene, seditious, blasphemous, heretical, and revolutionary.
  • Preface, The Sacredness Of Criticism

1940s and later

• The sex relation is not a personal relation. It can be irresistibly desired and rapturously consummated between persons who could not endure one another for a day in any other relation.
  • letter, 24 June 1930, to Frank Harris "To Frank Harris on Sex in Biography" Sixteen Self Sketches (1949)

• The quality of a play is the quality of its ideas.
  • "The Play of Ideas", New Statesman (6 May 1950)

• The apparent multiplicity of Gods is bewildering at the first glance; but you presently discover that they are all the same one God in different aspects and functions and even sexes. There is always one uttermost God who defies personification. This makes Hinduism the most tolerant religion in the world, because its one transcendent God includes all possible Gods... Hinduism is so elastic and so subtle that the profoundest Methodist and the crudest idolater are equally at home in it.
  Islam is very different, being ferociously intolerant. What I may call Manifold Monotheism becomes in the minds of very simple folk an absurdly polytheistic idolatry, just as European peasants not only worship Saints and the Virgin as Gods, but will fight fanatically for their faith in the ugly little black doll who is the Virgin of their own Church against the black doll of the next village. When the Arabs had run this sort of idolatry to such extremes ... they did this without black dolls and worshipped any stone that looked funny, Mahomet rose up at the risk of his life and insulted the stones shockingly, declaring that there is only one God, Allah, the glorious, the great... And there was to be no nonsense about toleration. You accepted Allah or you had your throat cut by someone who did accept him, and who went to Paradise for having sent you to Hell. Mahomet was a great Protestant religious force, like George Fox or Wesley....
  There is actually a great Hindu sect, the Jains, with Temples of amazing magnificence, which abolish God, not on materialist atheist considerations, but as unspeakable and unknowable, transcending all human comprehension.
  • Letter to the Reverend Ensor Walters (1933), as cited in Dan H. Laurence (ed) Bernard Shaw : Collected Letters, 1926-1950, New York: Viking (1988), p. 305

• A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.
  • Everybody's Political What's What (1944), Ch. 30, p. 256

• We have no reason to suppose that we are the Creator's last word.
  • Everybody's Political What's What (1944)

• I am a communist, but not a member of the Communist Party. Stalin is a first rate Fabian. I am one of the founders of Fabianism and as such very friendly to Russia.
  • As quoted in the Evening Herald in Dublin, Ireland (February 3, 1948), reprinted in Economic Council Letter, Issue 278, Part 397 (1952), p. 1807 [1]

• The road to ignorance is paved with good editions. Only the illiterate can afford to buy good books now.
  • As quoted in Days with Bernard Shaw (1949) by Stephen Winsten

• The secret of success is to offend the greatest number of people.
  • As quoted in Days with Bernard Shaw (1949) by Stephen Winsten

• Consistency is the enemy of enterprise, just as symmetry is the enemy of art.
  • As quoted in Bernard Shaw : The Lure of Fantasy (1991) by Michael Holroyd

• The first prison I ever saw had inscribed on it CEASE TO DO EVIL: LEARN TO DO WELL; but as the inscription was on the outside, the prisoners could not read it.
  • Preface to English Prisons Under Local Government by Sydney and Beatrice Webb (1922)

• Vulgarity is a necessary part of a complete author's equipment; and the clown is sometimes the best part of the circus.
  • Preface to London music in 1888-89 as heard by Corno di Bassetto (1937)

• The epithet beautiful is used by surgeons to describe operations which their patients describe as ghastly, by physicists to describe methods of measurement which leave sentimentalists cold, by lawyers to describe cases which ruin all the parties to them, and by lovers to describe the objects of their infatuation, however unattractive they may appear to the unaffected spectators.
  • Preface to Ellen Terry and Bernard Shaw: A Correspondence (1931)

• I know I began as a passion and have ended as a habit, like all husbands.
  • The Simpleton of the Unexpected Isles, Act 2 (1934)

• A man of my spiritual intensity does not eat corpses.
  • George Bernard Shaw, quoted by Hesketh Pearson, George Bernard Shaw: His Life and Personality, 1942

• Progress is impossible without change; and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything. Creeds, articles, and institutes of religious faith ossify our brains and make change impossible. As such they are nuisances, and in practice have to be mostly ignored.
  • Everybody's Political What's What? (ebook, must be borrowed) (1944), Chapter XXXVII: Creed and Conduct, p. 330

Attributed

• England and America are two countries divided [separated] by a common [the same] language. (attributed to Shaw despite not appearing in his writings, see Oxford Dictionary of Quotations [4th edn., p. 638, quote no. 31]. See also Esar & Bentley, 1951, Treasury of Humorous Quotations; earlier attributed to Shaw in the Reader's Digest, November 1942.)
  • The quotation is thought to derive from an Oscar Wilde short story, where the following appears: "Indeed, in many respects, she was quite English, and was an excellent example of the fact that we have really everything in common with America nowadays, except, of course, language" (Wilde, "The Canterville Ghost", 1887). See Rees, Nigel (14 September 2000). "Quote... Unquote": Current Most Frequently Asked Questions" (BBC Radio 4 programme webpages). Accessed 13 December 2022.
• The only time my education was interrupted was when I was in school.
  • Widely attributed to Shaw from the 1970s onward, but not known to exist in his published works. It is in keeping with some of his sardonic statements about the purposes and effectiveness of schools. First known attribution in print is in Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner's Teaching as a Subversive Activity (1971), "G. B. Shaw's line that the only time his education was interrupted was when he was in school captures the sense of this alienation."
• Dancing is a perpendicular expression of a horizontal desire. (attributed by George Melly in 1962, see Dancing Is a Perpendicular Expression of a Horizontal Desire. Quote Investigator..

Disputed

• If you're going to tell people the truth, you better make them laugh; otherwise they'll kill you.
  • Credited to Shaw in the lead in to the mockumentary C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America (2004) and other recent works, but this or slight variants of it are also sometimes attributed to W. C. Fields, Charlie Chaplin, and Oscar Wilde. It might possibly be derived from Shaw's statement in John Bull's Other Island (1907): "My way of joking is to tell the truth. It's the funniest joke in the world."
  • Another possibility is that it is derived from Shaw's characteristic of Mark Twain: "He has to put things in such a way as to make people who would otherwise hang him believe he is joking."
  • Variants:
  • If you are going to tell people the truth, you'd better make them laugh. Otherwise, they'll kill you.
  • If you're going to tell people the truth, you'd better make them laugh. Otherwise, they'll kill you.

• [Isadora Duncan] wrote to George Bernard Shaw: "Will you be the father of my next child? A combination of my beauty and your brains would startle the world," but he replied: "I must decline your offer with thanks, for the child might have my beauty and your brains."
  • Anecdote presented in "Isadore Duncan : Dancer as Plaything of Fate" in A Century of Sundays : 100 years of Breaking News in the Sunday Papers (2006), by Nadine Dreyer, p. 65; the anecdote provided here does not cite earlier sources, and though widely attributed to an exchange between Duncan and Shaw, the earliest form of it yet located is in 10,000 Jokes, Toasts & Stories (1939) by Lewis & Faye Copeland, which simply has an unidentified woman offering to have a child with Shaw, saying "think of the child with your brains and my beauty" and him replying "But what if he were to have your brains and my beauty?"

• Shaw: Madam, would you sleep with me for a million pounds?
  Actress: My goodness, Well, I'd certainly think about it
  Shaw: Would you sleep with me for a pound?
  Actress: Certainly not! What kind of woman do you think I am?!
  Shaw: Madam, we've already established that. Now we are haggling over the price.
  • Similar remarks are also attributed to Winston Churchill, Groucho Marx and to Mark Twain

• I have always held the religion of Muhammad in high estimation because of its wonderful vitality. It is the only religion which appears to me to possess that assimilating capability to the changing phase of existence which can make itself appeal to every age. The world must doubtless attach high value to the predictions of great men like me. I have prophesied about the faith of Muhammad that it would be acceptable to the Europe of tomorrow as it is beginning to be acceptable to the Europe of today. The medieval ecclesiastics, either through ignorance or bigotry, painted Muhammadanism in the darkest colours. They were in fact trained both to hate the man Muhammad and his religion. To them Muhammad was Anti-Christ. I have studied him — the wonderful man, and in my opinion far from being an Anti-Christ he must be called the Saviour of Humanity. I believe that if a man like him were to assume the dictatorship of the modern world he would succeed in solving its problems in a way that would bring it the much-needed peace and happiness. But to proceed, it was in the 19th century that honest thinkers like Carlyle, Goethe and Gibbon perceived intrinsic worth in the religion of Muhammad, and thus there was some change for the better in the European attitude towards Islam. But the Europe of the present century is far advanced. It is beginning to be enamoured of the creed of Muhammad.
  • Interview (April 1935), as quoted in The Genuine Islam, Vol. 1 (January 1936). A portion of the statement also appears quoted in The Islamic Review, Vol. 24 (1936) edited by Khwaja Kamal-ud-Din, p. 263

• I hold the Prophet of Arabia in great esteem and I can quite understand that it would have been impossible to restrain and wean that illiterate and perverse race, sunk in the miasma of utter moral depravity, from committing the most heinous of crimes, and imbue its people with enthusiasm to strive after righteousness and assimilate high morals and virtues, without projecting such a terrible and intensely awe inspiring spectacle of Hell and an equally captivating and enticing image of a land flowing with milk and honey to represent Heaven before their vision.
  • Interview (April 1935) in The Genuine Islam, Vol. 1, No. 8 (1936), as quoted at "A Shavian and a Theologian" at World Islamic Mission

Misattributed

• If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas.
  • George Bernard Shaw never said these words, but Charles F. Brannan did.[2]

• In my view, Anglo-Irish history is for Englishmen to remember, for Irishmen to forget.
  • Ireland in the New Century (1904) by Horace Plunkett
    • Often quoted as: Irish history is something no Englishman should forget and no Irishman should remember.

• You can't make a man a Christian unless you first make him believe he is a sinner.
  • Lin Yutang, The Importance of Living (1937), p. 17

• A: Would you sleep with me for $1,000,000?
  B: ...YES!
  A: How about $1?
  B: What do you think I am?
  • "The role of the character initiating the proposal in this anecdote has been assigned to George Bernard Shaw, Winston Churchill, Groucho Marx, Mark Twain, W. C. Fields, Bertrand Russell, H.G. Wells, Woodrow Wilson and others. However, the earliest example of this basic story found by QI did not spotlight any of the persons just listed [...]
  • [...] QI hypothesizes that this anecdote began as a fictional tale that was intended to be humorous with an edge of antagonism. The story was retold for decades. Famous men were substituted into the role of the individual making the proposition. Occasionally, the individual who received the proposition was also described as famous, but typically she remained unidentified.
  • [...] In January 1937 the syndicated newspaper columnist O. O. McIntyre printed a version of the anecdote that he says was sent to him as a newspaper clipping. This tale featured a powerful Canadian-British media magnate and politician named Max Aitken who was also referred to as Lord Beaverbrook [MJLB]":
    • Someone sends me a clipping from Columnist Lyons with this honey:
    • "They are telling this of Lord Beaverbrook and a visiting Yankee actress. In a game of hypothetical questions, Beaverbrook asked the lady: 'Would you live with a stranger if he paid you one million pounds?' She said she would. 'And if be paid you five pounds?' The irate lady fumed: 'Five pounds. What do you think I am?' Beaverbrook replied: 'We've already established that. Now we are trying to determine the degree."
      • Quote investigator cited 2013-07-10

• George Bernard Shaw is said to have told W.S.C.:
  Am reserving two tickets for you for my premiere. Come and bring a friend—if you have one.
  W.S.C. to G.B.S.:
  Impossible to be present for the first performance. Will attend the second—if there is one.
  • (Version given in Irrepressible Churchill: A Treasury of Winston Churchill's Wit by Kay Halle, 1966)
  • Apocryphal, from 1946. See discussion at Winston Churchill#Misattributed, and detailed discussion at "Here are Two Tickets for the Opening of My Play. Bring a Friend—If You Have One", Garson O'Toole, Quote Investigator, (March 25, 2012)

• The Bible is most dangerous book ever written on earth, keep it under lock and key.
  • From Why You Should Never be a Christian (1987) by Ishaq 'Kunle Sanni and ‎Dawood Ayodele Amoo.

• The trouble with her is that she lacks the power of conversation but not the power of speech.
  • Widely attributed to Shaw, this quotation is actually of unknown origin.

• The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.
  • The attribution to Shaw comes from Leadership Skills for Managers (2000) by Marlene Caroselli, p. 71. But this quote seems more likely to come from William H. Whyte.The Biggest Problem in Communication Is the Illusion That It Has Taken Place. Quote Investigator (2014-08-31). Retrieved on 2015-11-09.

• Success does not consist in never making blunders, but in never making the same one a second time.
  • H. W. Shaw (Josh Billings), as quoted in Scientific American, Vol. 31 (1874), p. 121, and in dictionaries of quotations such as Excellent Quotations for Home and School (1890) by Julia B. Hoitt, p. 117 and Many Thoughts of Many Minds: A Treasury of Quotations from the Literature of Every Land and Every Age (1896) by Louis Klopsch, p. 266.

• I learned long ago never to wrestle with a pig. ... You get dirty and besides the pig likes it.
  • Initially attributed to Cyrus S. Ching in Time, Vol. 56 (1950), p. 21. Also attributed to Mark Twain and Abraham Lincoln: Quote Investigator July 8, 2017.



Quotes about Shaw

Alphabetised by surname

Shaw is perhaps the most consciously conscious mind that has ever thought ... ~ Jacques Barzun

I never read a reply by Shaw that did not leave me in better and not worse temper or frame of mind ... ~ G. K. Chesterton

I found many men to whom I felt deeply grateful ... but the man I liked most and the man who seemed to remind me of myself — of what I really was and would surely become — was George Bernard Shaw. ~ William Saroyan

• Shaw's plays are the price we pay for Shaw's prefaces.
  • James Agate, diary entry (10 March 1933)

• The English writers who had a big influence on me during my adolescence were Sir Walter Scott, Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters, Charles Dickens, Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, and Virginia Woolf.
  • Isabel Allende Interview

• Shaw knows at any moment, on any subject, what he thinks, what you will think, what others have thought, what all this thinking entails; and he takes the most elaborate pains to bring these thoughts to light in a form which is by turns abstract and familiar, conciliatory and aggressive, obvious and inferential, comic and puzzling. In a word, Shaw is perhaps the most consciously conscious mind that has ever thought — certainly the most conscious since Rousseau; which may be why both of them often create the same impression of insincerity amounting to charlatanism. Yet it is by excess of honesty that Shaw himself lent color to his representation as an inconsequential buffoon bent on monopolizing the spotlight.
  • Jacques Barzun, in "Bernard Shaw in Twilight" in The Kenyon Review (Summer 1943)

• Seeing clearly within himself and always able to dodge around the ends of any position, including his own, Shaw assumed from the start the dual role of prophet and gadfly.
  • Jacques Barzun, in "Bernard Shaw in Twilight" in The Kenyon Review (Summer 1943)

• Shaw does not merely decorate a proposition, but makes his way from point to point through new and difficult territory.
  • Jacques Barzun, in "Bernard Shaw in Twilight" in The Kenyon Review (Summer 1943)

• He never invested his whole moral capital in a man, a book, or a cause, but treasured up wisdom wherever it could be picked up, always with scrupulous acknowledgment ... His eclecticism saving him from the cycle of hope-disillusion-despair, his highest effectiveness was as a skirmisher in the daily battle for light and justice, as a critic of new doctrine and a refurbisher of old, as a voice of warning and encouragement. That his action has not been in vain, we can measure by how little Shaw's iconoclasm stirs our blood; we no longer remember what he destroyed that was blocking our view.
  • Jacques Barzun, in "Bernard Shaw in Twilight" in The Kenyon Review (Summer 1943)

• Bernard Shaw remains the only model we have of what the citizen of a democracy should be: an informed participant in all things we deem important to the society and the individual.
  • Jacques Barzun "Bernard Shaw," in A Jacques Barzun Reader: Selections from his works (2002), p. 231

• Mr. Shaw cannot realise his own pertness, nor can he preserve his own gravity, for more than a few moments at a time. Even when he sets out to be funny for fun's sake, he must needs always pretend that there is a serious reason for the emprise; and he pretends so strenuously that he ends by convincing us almost as fully as he convinces himself. Thus the absurdity, whatever it be, comes off doubly well. Conversely, even when he is really engrossed in some process of serious argument, or moved to real eloquence by one of his social ideals, he emits involuntarily some wild jape which makes the whole thing ridiculous — as ridiculous to himself as to us; and straightway he proceeds to caricature his own thesis till everything is topsy-turvy; and we, rolling with laughter, look up and find him no longer on his head, but on his heels, talking away quite gravely; and this sets us off again. For, of course, when seriousness and frivolity thus co-exist inseparably in a man, the seriousness is nullified by the frivolity. The latter is fed by the former, but, graceless and vampire-like, kills it. As a teacher, as a propagandist, Mr. Shaw is no good at all, even in his own generation. But as a personality he is immortal.
  Posterity will not, I fancy, read his writings. He has not enough of the specific art-sense for writing. I will not exasperate him by complaining that he has no sense of beauty in the use of his medium: the idea of beauty is a red rag to him, as we know. I will merely suggest that he has in his writing the qualities of a public speaker rather than of a writer. He does not write with that closeness which is the result not of haste but of leisure, and which is the main secret of good literature. He is too glib, too fluent, too diffuse, and too loud. Glibness and fluency, loudness and diffusion, are just the qualities needed for addressing an audience. But between speaking and writing there is a vast difference. A good writer cannot make good speeches, and Mr. Shaw's seems an instance to prove that a good speaker cannot write well. We, his contemporaries, can read him with delight, even though we seem to miss the reporter's interpolation of "laughter", "cheers", "interruption", and so forth. But relentlessly, in course of time, lack of solid form "tells on" writing. However interesting a writer may be, he will not, unless he be a strict artist, be read by posterity. Style, as has been said, is the one antiseptic. But, though Mr. Shaw's writing be not good enough for the next generation, he himself, being so signally unique, is good enough for all time. I wish I had the leisure to be his Boswell, and he the kindness to be my Johnson.
  • Max Beerbohm, in "A Cursory Conspectus of G. B. S." in The Saturday Review of Politics, Science and Art (2 November 1901)

• The writers of our century delight in the weaknesses of the human condition; the only one capable of inventing heroes was Bernard Shaw.
  • Jorge Luis Borges, Obra Completa (1996), Vol. IV, p. 487

• "God spare you, reader, of long prefaces". That was written by Quevedo, who, in order not to commit an anachronism that would have been found out in the long run, never read Shaw´s.
  • Jorge Luis Borges, Obra Completa (1996), Vol. II, p. 400

• He was a Tolstoy with jokes, a modern Dr Johnson, a universal genius who on his own modest reckoning put even Shakespeare in the shade.
  • John Campbell, The Independent, as quoted in Penguin Classics edition of Plays Unpleasant (1946)

• In his works Shaw left us his mind ... Today we have no Shavian wizard to awaken us with clarity and paradox, and the loss to our national intelligence is immense.
  • John Carey, The Sunday Times, as quoted in Penguin Classics edition of Plays Unpleasant (1946)

• I never read a reply by Shaw that did not leave me in better and not worse temper or frame of mind; which did not seem to come out of inexhaustible fountains of fairmindedness and intellectual geniality; which did not savor somehow of that native largeness which the philosophers attributed to Magnanimous Man.
  • G. K. Chesterton, commenting on twenty years of debate with Shaw on political, religious and other social issues.

• He said that one should never tell a child anything without letting him hear the opposite opinion. That is to say, when you tell Tommy not to hit his sick sister on the temple, you must make sure of the presence of some Nietzscheite professor, who will explain to him that such a course might possibly serve to eliminate the unfit. When you are in the act of telling Susan not to drink out of the bottle labelled "poison," you must telegraph for a Christian Scientist, who will be ready to maintain that without her own consent it cannot do her any harm. What would happen to a child brought up on Shaw's principle I cannot conceive; I should think he would commit suicide in his bath.
  • G. K. Chesterton: George Bernard Shaw. 1909. p. 174. 

• What a debt every intelligent being owes to Bernard Shaw!
  • John Maynard Keynes, "One of Wells' Worlds" (Review of the World of William Clissold") in The New Republic (1 February 1927)

• Shaw and Stalin are still satisfied with Marx's picture of the capitalist world... They look backwards to what capitalism was, not forward to what it is becoming.
  • John Maynard Keynes,"Stalin-Wells Talk: The Verbatim Report and A Discussion", G.B. Shaw, J.M. Keynes et al., London, The New Statesman and Nation, (1934) p. 34

• Shaw was a very great man indeed. The danger is that when all the froth and nonsense about his being a philosopher has died down (as it must) a reaction should set in and lead people to forget his real genius. He was a comedian, in his own time, of the very highest order ... He was a humorist of the more intellectual kind, a master of satire, art and fantasy like Gilbert, Wilde and Aristophanes. In that class no one had more continuous vitality. He is also, in his prefaces, one of the great masters of plain prose. I have often, in that capacity, held him up as a model to my pupils and have learned much from him myself. Peace to his ashes!
  • C. S. Lewis, in "Comedian of Highest Order", in The Mark Twain Journal, Vol. 9, no. 4 (Summer 1954), p. 10

• He did his best in redressing the fateful unbalance between truth and reality, in lifting mankind to a higher rung of social maturity. He often pointed a scornful finger at human frailty, but his jests were never at the expense of humanity.
  • Thomas Mann, as quoted in Penguin Classics edition of Plays Unpleasant (1946)

• Desmond MacCarthy, whom I tried to persuade to write a new appreciation of Shaw in old age, noticed a real deterioration in Shaw himself. The Shaw who had praised Mussolini and justified Hitler grew increasingly irresponsible in suggesting that people who were a nuisance should be killed. This strain in Shaw, and his characteristic inconsistency when he dropped back suddenly into individualism, after maintaining the State's right to liquidate anyone it disapproved of, had been growing steadily stronger from Major Barbara onwards. He ceased to have a genuine humanism such as he had shown in the splendid preface to John Bull's Other Island. In general, re-reading Shaw, MacCarthy said he could find nothing but "a chaos of clear ideas".
  • Kingsley Martin, Editor: A Second Volume of Autobiography, 1931-45 (1968), p. 110

• He understood early the weakness of democracy; he was naturally impatient with the shallow humbug of much political talk. There was so much in it to laugh at, and so much to expose, that he even allowed himself to praise Mussolini and Hitler and to excuse all the darker deeds of Stalin. In 1948 he sent me a letter describing Russia as a democracy in which Stalin would be pushed out of power in ten minutes if he offended the majority of the Communist Party.
  • Kingsley Martin, Editor: A Second Volume of Autobiography, 1931-45 (1968), p. 112

• Shaw presumes that his friend Stalin has everything under control. Well, Stalin may have made special arrangements to see that Shaw comes to no harm, but the rest of us in Western Europe do not feel quite so sure of our fate,especially those of us who do not share Shaw's curious admiration for dictators.
  • J. B. Priestley, The War - And After, in Horizon magazine (January 1940), reprinted in War Decade : An Anthology of the 1940s (1989) by Andrew Sinclair

• One may say that he [Shaw] did much good and some harm. As an iconoclast he was admirable, but as an eikon rather less so.
  • Bertrand Russell, Portraits from Memory and Other Essays (1956)

• [Shaw] had just learned, more less, to ride a bicycle. And I went out for a country ride with him, and at the bottom of a steep hill the road forked and I didn't know which way to go, and Shaw was behind me. And I got off my bicycle to ask which way we should go. And he wasn't able to manage his machine, and he ran slap into my bicycle. My bicycle buckled. He was precipitated 20 teet through the air and landed on his back on the hard road. He got up, his bicycle undamaged, rode home: I had to go home by train.
  • Bertrand Russell, in an interview with David Susskind (10 June 1962)

• I found many men to whom I felt deeply grateful — especially Guy de Maupassant, Jack London, and H. L. Mencken — but the first man to whom I felt definitely related was George Bernard Shaw. This is a presumptuous or fatuous thing to mention, perhaps, but even so it must be mentioned. ... I myself, as a person, have been influenced by many writers and many things, and my writing has felt the impact of the writing of many writers, some relatively unknown and unimportant, some downright bad. But probably the greatest influence of them all when an influence is most effective — when the man being influenced is nowhere near being solid in his own right — has been the influence of the great tall man with the white beard, the lively eyes, the swift wit and the impish chuckle. ... I have been fascinated by it all, grateful for it all, grateful for the sheer majesty of the existence of ideas, stories, fables, and paper and ink and print and books to hold them all together for a man to take aside and examine alone. But the man I liked most and the man who seemed to remind me of myself — of what I really was and would surely become — was George Bernard Shaw.
  • William Saroyan, Hello Out There (1941)

• Shaw is a pleasant man, simple, direct, sincere, animated; but self-possessed, sane, and evenly poised, acute, engaging, companionable, and quite destitute of affectation. I liked him.
  • Mark Twain, after meeting Shaw in 1907

• His argument seems to be that either the Haves or the Have-Nots must seize power and compel all to come under the Fascist or the Communist plough. It is a crude and flippant attempt at reconstruction, bred of conceit, impatience and ignorance. ... [I]t reinforces the Italian tyranny. It is only fair to add that this naïve faith in a Superman before whose energy and genius all must bow down is not a new feature in the Shaw mentality. What is new and deplorable is the absence of any kind of sympathetic appreciation of the agony that the best and wisest Italians are today going through; any appreciation of the mental degradation as implied in the suppression of all liberty of thought and speech.
  • Beatrice Webb's diary (1927), quoted in Beatrice Webb, Diaries: 1924-1932, ed. Margaret Cole (1952), p. 155

• The worst element in his mental make-up is a queer readiness to succumb to the poses of excessive virility. His soul goes down before successful force. He exalted the maker of enormous guns in Man and Superman; he has rejoiced in the worst claptrap of the Napoleonic legend; now he is striking attitudes of adoration towards the poor, vain, doomed biped who is making Rome horrible and ridiculous to all the world. When it comes to the torture of intelligent men, to vile outrages on old women, to the strangulation of all sane criticism and an orgy of claptrap more dreadful than its attendant cruelties, this vituperative anti-vivisectionist becomes an applauding spectator.
  • H. G. Wells, The Way The World Is Going (1929), p. 279

• Uncle Wells was as magnificent an uncle as one could hope to have. So, too, was Uncle Shaw. He brought his mind for the children to look at, his marvellous shining mind. Too thin a mind, Philistines would object; but the very finest French watches are as thin as a couple of halfcrowns and yet keep better time than the grosser article. He did for his age what Voltaire and Gibbon did for theirs: he popularized the use of the intellectual processes among the politically effective class. And he did it with such style.
  • Rebecca West, The Strange Necessity. Doubleday, Doran, Incorporated, 1928 (pp. 216-217).

• In fact, the real problem with the thesis of A Genealogy of Morals is that the noble and the aristocrat are just as likely to be stupid as the plebeian. I had noted in my teens that major writers are usually those who have had to struggle against the odds -- to "pull their cart out of the mud," as I put it -- while writers who have had an easy start in life are usually second rate -- or at least, not quite first-rate. Dickens, Balzac, Dostoevsky, Shaw, H. G. Wells, are examples of the first kind; in the twentieth century, John Galsworthy, Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, and Samuel Beckett are examples of the second kind. They are far from being mediocre writers; yet they tend to be tinged with a certain pessimism that arises from never having achieved a certain resistance against problems.
  • Colin Wilson in The Books In My Life, p. 188

See also

• Eugenics

External links

• Works by or about George Bernard Shaw at the Internet Archive]
• Works by George Bernard Shaw at Project Gutenberg
• Works by George Bernard Shaw at Project Gutenberg Australia
• George Bernard Shaw on IMDb
• International Shaw Society, includes a chronology of Shaw's works
• The Shaw Society, UK, established in 1941
• The Bernard Shaw Society, New York
• Shaw Chicago Theater A theater dedicated to the works of Shaw & his contemporaries.
• Shaw Festival Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, Canada theatre that specializes in plays by Bernard Shaw and his contemporaries and plays about his era (1856-1950)
• The Nobel Prize Biography on Shaw, From Nobel Lectures, Literature 1901–1967, Editor Horst Frenz, Elsevier Publishing Company, Amsterdam (1969)
• Dan H. Laurence/Shaw Collection in the University of Guelph. Archived from the original on 30 June 2009.
• Michael Holroyd (July 19, 2006). Send for Shaw, not Shakespeare. The Times Literary Supplement. Archived from the original on 29 September 2006.
• Sunder Katwala (July 26, 2006). "Artist of the impossible". The Guardian. 
• George Bernard Shaw Timeline. Archived from the original on 8 Jule 2008.
• Bernard Shaw papers at LSE Archives. Archived from the original on 30 June 2002.