George Bernard Shaw (1856 – 1950)
Irish playwright, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1925.
I heard your prayers Thank God it's all over!
The only time my education was interrupted was when I was in school.
You cannot have power for good without having power for evil too. Even mother's milk nourishes murderers as well as heroes.
The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them: that's the essence of inhumanity.
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.
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.
The great advantage of a hotel is that it's a refuge from home life.
My way of joking is to tell the truth. It's the funniest joke in the world.
When a heretic wishes to avoid martyrdom he speaks of “Orthodoxy, True and False” and demonstrates that the True is his heresy.
Every fool believes what his teachers tell him, and calls his credulity science or morality as confidently as his father called it divine revelation.
Disobedience, the rarest and most courageous of the virtues, is seldom distinguished from neglect, the laziest and commonest of the vices.
Independence? That's middle-class blasphemy. We are all dependent on one another, every soul of us on earth.
If you begin by sacrificing yourself to those you love, you will end by hating those to whom you have sacrificed yourself.
The worst cliques are those which consist of one man.
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.
Shaw's plays are the price we pay for Shaw's prefaces.
The writers of our century delight in the weaknesses of the human condition; the only one capable of inventing heroes was Bernard Shaw.
I can't talk religion to a man with bodily hunger in his eyes.
Scratch an Englishman and find a Protestant.
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.