George Bernard Shaw

As long as I have a want, I have a reason for living. Satisfaction is death.

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

The word morality, if we met it in the Bible, would surprise us as much as the word telephone or motor car.

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.

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."

Why was I born with such contemporaries?

You are all missionaries and proselytizers trying to uproot the native religion from your neighbor's flowerbeds and plant your own in its place.

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.

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 …

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

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

All progress means war with Society.

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

The secret of forgiving everything is to understand nothing.

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

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.

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

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.

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 …

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

There is no subject on which more dangerous nonsense is talked and thought than marriage.

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

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 …

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