"I am enclosing two tickets to the first night of my new play; bring a friend... if you have one."
Read quote
5 likes
Quote collection
George Bernard Shaw quotes (page 41 of 68)
1.3K quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"You do not settle whether an argument is justified by merely showing that it is of some use. The distinction is not between useful and useless experiments but between barbarous and civilized behaviour. Vivisection is a social evil because if it advances human knowledge, it does so at the expense of human character."
Read quote
5 likes
"Most of the money given by rich people in "charity" is made up of conscience money, "ransom," political bribery, and bids for titles.... One buys moral credit by signing a cheque, which is easier than turning a prayer wheel."
Read quote
5 likes
"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?"
Read quote
5 likes
"It is a monstrous thing to force a child to learn Latin or Greek or mathematics on the ground that they are an indispensable gymnastic for the mental powers. It would be monstrous even if it were true."
Read quote
5 likes
"Love is a simple thing and a deep thing: it is an act of life and not an illusion. Art is an illusion."
Read quote
5 likes
"God is on the side of the big battalions."
Read quote
5 likes
"Home is the girl's prison and the woman's workhouse."
Read quote
5 likes
"Liquor is the chloroform which enables the poor man to endure the painful operation of living."
Read quote
5 likes
"Now of all the idealist abominations that make society pestiferous I doubt if there be any so mean as that of forcing self-sacrifice on a woman under the pretense that she likes it."
Read quote
5 likes
"I can forgive Alfred Nobel for having invented dynamite, but only a fiend in human form could have invented the Nobel Prize."
Read quote
5 likes
"The road to ignorance is paved with good editions. Only the illiterate can afford to buy good books now."
Read quote
5 likes
"I like a bit of mongrel myself, whether it's a man or a dog."
Read quote
5 likes
"Time enough to think of the future when you haven't any future to think of."
Read quote
5 likes
"In order to fully realize how bad a popular play can be, it is necessary to see it twice."
Read quote
5 likes
"He who confuses political liberty with freedom and political equality with similarity has never thought for five minutes about either."
Read quote
5 likes
"The notion that persons should be safe from extermination as long as they do not commit willful murder, or levy war against the Crown, or kidnap, or throw vitriol, is not only to limit social responsibility unnecessarily, and to privilege the large range of intolerable misconduct that lies outside them, but to divert attention from the essential justification for extermination, which is always incorrigible social incompatibility and nothing else."
Read quote
5 likes
"It is necessary for the welfare of society that genius should be privileged to utter sedition, to blaspheme, to outrage good taste, to corrupt the youthful mind, and generally to scandalize one's uncles."
Read quote
5 likes
"What you are to do without me I cannot imagine."
Read quote
5 likes
"There are some experiences in life which should not be demanded twice from any man, and one of them is listening to the Brahms Requiem."
Read quote
5 likes