The quotations of

George Bernard Shaw

Irish playwright, critic, and polemicist

1856–1950

99 quotes, most often on Love, Morality and Clever Jabs.

Patriotism is, fundamentally, a conviction that a particular country is the best in the world because you were born in it…
In The World (15 November 1893)
- Patriotism
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
- Freedom
When a heretic wishes to avoid martyrdom he speaks of “Orthodoxy, True and False” and demonstrates that the True is his heresy.
Maxims for Revolutionists (1903), #172
- Religion
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.
“The Living Pictures”, The Saturday Review (6 April 1895); reprinted in Our Theatres in the Nineties (1932)
- Religion
Disobedience, the rarest and most courageous of the virtues, is seldom distinguished from neglect, the laziest and commonest of the vices.
Maxims for Revolutionists (1903), #89
- Courage
- Virtue
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.
Quintessence Of Ibsenism (1891; 1913)
- Good & Evil
- Laughter
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.
Maxims for Revolutionists (1903), #62
- Animals
- Justice
Pardon him, Theodotus: he is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature.
Caesar and Cleopatra (1898)
- Clever Jabs
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.
Getting Married (1908), Hotchkiss
- Religion
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.
The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism (1928)
- Clever Jabs
- Politics
One man that has a mind and knows it can always beat ten men who havnt and dont.
The Apple Cart (1928), Act I
- Intelligence
Love is an appetite which, like all other appetites, is destroyed for the moment by its gratification.
Getting Married (1908), Preface
- Love
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
- Humor
- Writing
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)
- Children
- Truth & Lies
It is more dangerous to be a great prophet or poet than to promote twenty companies for swindling simple folk out of their savings.
Misalliance (1910), Preface
- Business
- Poetry

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