Quotes By George Bernard Shaw

Better never than late.

If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience.

When a man wants to murder a tiger he calls it sport; when a tiger wants to murder him he calls it ferocity.

Nothing is ever done in this world until men are prepared to kill one another if it is not done.

The art of government is the organisation of idolatry.

What is virtue but the Trade Unionism of the married?

Marriage is popular because it combines the maximum of temptation with the maximum of opportunity.

It's so hard to know what to do when one wishes earnestly to do right.

Kings are not born: they are made by artificial hallucination.

Only on paper has humanity yet achieved glory, beauty, truth, knowledge, virtue, and abiding love.

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

It is a curious sensation: the sort of pain that goes mercifully beyond our powers of feeling. When your heart is broken, your boats are burned: nothing matters any more. It is the end of happiness and the beginning of peace.

Find enough clever things to say, and you're a Prime Minister; write them down and you're a Shakespeare.

An election is a moral horror, as bad as a battle except for the blood; a mud bath for every soul concerned in it.

When a man says money can do anything, that settles it: he hasn't got any.

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

Beware of false knowledge; it is more dangerous than ignorance.

My reputation grows with every failure.

Beauty is all very well at first sight; but who ever looks at it when it has been in the house three days?

Political necessities sometime turn out to be political mistakes.

Most people do not pray; they only beg.

The only service a friend can really render is to keep up your courage by holding up to you a mirror in which you can see a noble image of yourself.

The only secrets are the secrets that keep themselves.

It is the mark of a truly intelligent person to be moved by statistics.

What a man believes may be ascertained, not from his creed, but from the assumptions on which he habitually acts.

We learn from experience that men never learn anything from experience.

A perpetual holiday is a good working definition of hell.

Success does not consist in never making mistakes but in never making the same one a second time.

What we want is to see the child in pursuit of knowledge, and not knowledge in pursuit of the child.

Old men are dangerous: it doesn't matter to them what is going to happen to the world.