George Bernard Shaw quote: "The utmost I can bear for myself in my best days is that I was one of the hundred best playwrights in the world, which is hardly a supreme distinction."

I am a Christian. That obliges me to be a Communist.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

General consultant to mankind.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

You cannot be a hero without being a coward.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

A gentleman is one who puts more into the world than he takes out.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

The first condition of progress is the removal of censorship.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

A happy family is but an earlier heaven.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

Silence is the most perfect expression of scorn.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

Better keep yourself clean and bright; you are the window through which you must see the world.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

Life isn't about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

Do not do unto others as you expect they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

The liar's punishment is not in the least that he is not believed, but that he cannot believe an...
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work the more I live. I rejoice in life...
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

The worst sin toward our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them: that&#...
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

First love is only a little foolishness and a lot of curiosity.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

You see things; and you say 'Why?' But I dream things that never were; and I say 'Why no...
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

A little learning is a dangerous thing, but we must take that risk because a little is as much as ou...
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

He knows nothing and thinks he knows everything. That points clearly to a political career.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

Just do what must be done. This may not be happiness, but it is greatness.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

Power does not corrupt men; fools, however, if they get into a position of power, corrupt power.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

If you leave the smallest corner of your head vacant for a moment, other people's opinions will ...
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

All great truths begin as blasphemies.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

I want to destroy ownership in order that possession and enjoyment may be raised to the highest poin...
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

The Old Testament God is a person with body parts and passions. The Church of England God has neithe...
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

A man who has no office to go, to I don't care who he is, is a trial of which you can have no co...
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

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

A veteran journalist has never had time to think twice before he writes.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

While we ourselves are the living graves of murdered animals, how can we expect any ideal living con...
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

An index is a great leveller.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

Do not try to live forever. You will not succeed.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

Very few people can afford to be poor.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

The idea of personal salvation is intensely repugnant to me when it is not absurd. Imagine Roosevelt...
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

The only fundamental and possible socialism is the socialisation of the selective breeding of man.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

If you injure your neighbour, better not do it by halves.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

If I were a woman, I'd simply refuse to speak to any man or do anything for men until I'd go...
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

We are the only real aristocracy in the world: the aristocracy of money.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

The heretic is always better dead. And mortal eyes cannot distinguish the saint from the heretic.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

We should all be obliged to appear before a board every five years and justify our existence... on p...
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

The British soldier can stand up to anything except the British War Office.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

The natural term of the affection of the human animal for its offspring is six years.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

Those who do not know how to live must make a merit of dying.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

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

Choose silence of all virtues, for by it you hear other men's imperfections, and conceal your ow...
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

England and America are two countries separated by the same language.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

I have to live for others and not for myself: that's middle-class morality.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

The secret to success is to offend the greatest number of people.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

Statistics show that of those who contract the habit of eating, very few survive.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

One man that has a mind and knows it can always beat ten men who haven't and don't.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

Syllables govern the world.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

Home life is no more natural to us than a cage is natural to a cockatoo.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

Which painting in the National Gallery would I save if there was a fire? The one nearest the door of...
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

I dislike feeling at home when I am abroad.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

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

I never resist temptation, because I have found that things that are bad for me do not tempt me.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

The minority is sometimes right; the majority always wrong.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

I'm an atheist and I thank God for it.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

The man with a toothache thinks everyone happy whose teeth are sound. The poverty-stricken man makes...
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

I never thought much of the courage of a lion tamer. Inside the cage he is at least safe from people...
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

Better never than late.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they wa...
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

Democracy is a device that insures we shall be governed no better than we deserve.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

The only service a friend can really render is to keep up your courage by holding up to you a mirror...
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

There are two tragedies in life. One is to lose your heart's desire. The other is to gain it.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

If I own a large part of Scotland, I can turn the people off the land practically into the sea or ac...
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

The only secrets are the secrets that keep themselves.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

Perhaps the greatest social service that can be rendered by anybody to the country and to mankind is...
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

There is nothing so bad or so good that you will not find an Englishman doing it; but you will never...
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

Majesty: when a stupid man is doing something he is ashamed of, he always declares that it is his du...
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

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

You have set up in New York Harbor a monstrous idol which you call Liberty. The only thing that rema...
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

You have to choose between trusting to the natural stability of gold and the natural stability of th...
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

The best reformers the world has ever seen are those who commence on themselves.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

Life is a disease; and the only difference between one man and another is the stage of the disease a...
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

The fickleness of the women I love is only equaled by the infernal constancy of the women who love m...
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

First love is only a little foolishness and a lot of curiosity: no really self-respecting woman woul...
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

If you value a man's regard, strive with him. As to liking, you like your newspaper -- and despise i...
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and ab...
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

You must not suppose, because I am a man of letters, that I never tried to earn an honest living.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

A man who has no office to go to--I don't care who he is--is a trial of which you can have no conce...
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

Caesar was a man of great common sense and good taste, meaning thereby a man without originality or ...
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

A statesman who confines himself to popular legislation - or, for the matter of that, a playwright w...
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

The art of government is the organization of idolatry. The bureaucracy consists of functionaries; th...
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

Men are not governed by justice, but by law or persuasion. When they refuse to be governed by law or...
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

Whenever you wish to do anything against the law, Cicely, always consult a good solicitor first.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

No man ever believes that the Bible means what it says: He is always convinced that it says what he...
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

I often quote myself. It adds spice to my conversation.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

I often quote myself. It adds spice to my conversation. •George Bernard Shaw It is better ...
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

No question is so difficult to answer as that which the answer is obvious.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

A man who does not think for himself does not think at all.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

A man thinking or working is always alone, let him be where he will.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

The open mind never acts: when we have done our utmost to arrive at a reasonable conclusion, we st...
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

I dread success. To have succeeded is to have finished one's business on earth, like the male spider...
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

You cannot have power for good without having power for evil too. Even mother's milk nourishes murde...
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

People exaggerate the value of things they haven't got: everybody worships truth and unselfishness b...
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

You see things and you say "Why?"; but I dream things that never were and I say "Why not?".
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

Better keep yourself clean and bright. You are the window through which you must see the world.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

The secret of forgiving everything is to understand nothing
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

If women were as fastidious as men, morally or physically, there would be an end of the race.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

Power does not corrupt man; fools, however, if they get into a position of power, corrupt power.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don't believe in circumstances. T...
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

There is nothing that can be changed more completely than human nature when the job is taken in hand...
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

Human beings are the only animals of which I am thoroughly and cravenly afraid.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

Physically there is nothing to distinguish human society from the farm-yard except that children are...
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

There is always danger for those who are afraid.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

Science becomes dangerous only when it imagines that it has reached its goal.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

Science is always wrong, it never solves a problem without creating ten more.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

I was a freethinker before I knew how to think.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

Few people think more than two or three times a year. I have made an international reputation for my...
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

It is difficult, if not impossible, for most people to think otherwise than in the fashion of their ...
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

The Jews generally give value. They make you pay; but they deliver the goods. In my experience the m...
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

My religion? Well, my dear, I am a Millionaire. That is my religion.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

All the sweetness of religion is conveyed to the world by the hands of story-tellers and image-maker...
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

We sing in a church, why can we not dance there?
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

What is wrong with priests and popes is that instead of being apostles and saints, they are nothing ...
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

The great danger of conversion in all ages has been that when the religion of the high mind is offer...
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

Even the youngest of us may be wrong sometimes.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

The only man I know who behaves sensibly is my tailor; he takes my measurements anew each time he se...
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

The more I see of the moneyed classes, the more I understand the guillotine.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

Life at its noblest leaves mere happiness far behind; and indeed cannot endure it. Happiness is not ...
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

A lifetime of happiness? No man alive could bear it; it would be hell on earth.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

Give a man health and a course to steer; and he'll never stop to trouble about whether he's happy or...
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

But a lifetime of happiness! No man alive could bear it: it would be hell on earth.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

The only way for a woman to provide for herself decently is for her to be good to some man that can ...
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

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

A man who has no office to go to -- I don't care who he is -- is a trial of which you can have no co...
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

Nothing makes a man so selfish as work.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

When I was a young man I observed that nine out of ten things I did were failures. I didn't want to ...
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

Though I can make my extravaganzas appear credible, I cannot make the truth appear so.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

Man can climb to the highest summits, but he cannot dwell there long.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

Success covers a multitude of blunders.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

How can you dare teach a man to read until you've taught him everything else first?
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

We mustn't be stiff and stand-off, you know. We must be thoroughly democratic, and patronize everybo...
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

Better see rightly on a pound a week than squint on a million.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

The only way to avoid being miserable is not to have enough leisure to wonder whether you are happy ...
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

Money is indeed the most important thing in the world; and all sound and successful personal and nat...
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

Money is the most important thing in the world. It represents health, strength, honor, generosity, a...
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

The universal regard for money is the one hopeful fact in our civilization. Money is the most import...
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

It is a woman's business to get married as soon as possible, and a man's to keep unmarried as long a...
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

When two people are under the influence of the most violent, most insane, most delusive, and most tr...
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

This comes of James teaching me to think for myself, and never to hold back out of fear of what othe...
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

Dying is a troublesome business: there is pain to be suffered, and it wrings one's heart; but death ...
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

Life levels all men. Death reveals the eminent.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

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

Never waste jealousy on a real man: it is the imaginary man that supplants us all in the long run.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

To me the sole hope of human salvation lies in teaching Man to regard himself as an experiment in th...
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

The savage bows down to idols of wood and stone: the civilized man to idols of flesh and blood.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

This is the true joy of life, the being used up for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one...
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

In your Salvation shelter I saw poverty, misery, cold and hunger. You gave them bread and treacle an...
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

When we know what God is, we shall be gods ourselves.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drun...
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

I believe in Michelangelo, Velasquez, and Rembrandt; in the might of design, the mystery of color, t...
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

Beauty is all very well at first sight; but whoever looks at it when it has been in the house three ...
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

Although I cannot lay an egg, I am a very good judge of omelettes
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

I don't know if there are men on the moon, but if there are they must be using the earth as their lu...
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

The English have no respect for their language, and will not teach their children to speak it.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

My father must have had some elementary education for he could read and write and keep accounts inac...
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

[H]e is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

Make it a rule never to give a child a book you would not read yourself.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

Criminals do not die by the hands of the law. They die by the hands of other men.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

Dancing is a perpendicular expression of a horizontal desire.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they'll kill you.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

My religious convictions and scientific views cannot at present be more specifically defined than as...
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

No man can be a pure specialist without being in the strict sense an idiot.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

All professions are conspiracies against the laity.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

All problems are finally scientific problems.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

You are all fundamentalists with a top dressing of science. That is why you are the stupidest of con...
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

Animals are my friends...and I don't eat my friends.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

A man of my spiritual intensity does not eat corpses.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

I choose not to make a graveyard of my body for the rotting corpses of dead animals.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

The thought of two thousand people crunching celery at the same time horrified me.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

Hatred is the coward's revenge for being intimidated.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

I am enclosing two tickets to the first night of my new play; bring a friend ... if you have one." GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

You see things; you say, 'Why?' But I dream things that never were; and I say 'Why not?
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don't believe in circumstances. T...
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

Life isn't about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

A pessimist is a man who thinks everybody is as nasty as himself, and hates them for it.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

The liar's punishment is, not in the least that he is not believed, but that he cannot believe anyon...
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

Doing what needs to be done may not make you happy, but it will make you great.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

Youth is wasted on the young.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

Man is the only animal of which I am thoroughly and cravenly afraid of.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

Reminiscences make one feel so deliciously aged and sad.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

Morality is suspecting other people of not being legally married.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

An Englishman thinks he is moral when he is only uncomfortable.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

The more things a man is ashamed of, the more respectable he is.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

A miracle is an event which creates faith. That is the purpose and nature of miracles. Frauds deceiv...
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they wa...
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

Put an Irishman on the spit and you can always get another Irishman to turn him.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

I showed my appreciation of my native land in the usual Irish way: by getting out of it as soon as I...
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

The seven deadly sins... food, clothing, firing, rent, taxes, respectability and children. Nothing c...
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

The greatest evils and the worst of crimes is poverty; our first duty, a duty to which every other c...
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

The camera can represent flesh so superbly that, if I dared, I would never photograph a figure witho...
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

The philosopher is Nature's pilot. And there you have our difference: to be n hell is to drift: to b...
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

A pessimist is a man who thinks everybody is as nasty as himself.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

If there was nothing wrong in the world there wouldn't be anything for us to do.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

Peace is not only better than war, but infinitely more arduous
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

Patriotism is a pernicious, psychopathic form of idiocy.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were ...
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

You'll never have a quiet world until you knock the patriotism out of the human race.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

Find enough clever things to say, and you're a Prime Minister; write them down and you're a Shakespe...
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

Independence? That's middle-class blasphemy. We are all dependent on one another, every soul of us o...
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

The utmost I can bear for myself in my best days is that I was one of the hundred best playwrights in the world, which is hardly a supreme distinction.

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George Bernard Shaw

The utmost I can bear for myself in my best days is that I was one of the hundred best playwrights in the world, which is hardly a supreme distinction.

George Bernard Shaw

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