George Bernard Shaw Nation Quotations

Imagination is the beginning of creation.

Must then a Christ perish in torment in every age to save those that have no imagination.

Conceive. That is the word that means both the beginning in imagination and the end in creation.

If ever I utter an oath again may my soul be blasted to eternal damnation!

Where equality is undisputed, so also is subordination.

The heart of an Irishman is nothing but his imagination

Just as I cannot remember any time when I could not read and write, I cannot remember any time when I did not exercise my imagination in daydreams about women.

Assassination on the scaffold is the worst form of assassination.

You can be a thorough-going Neo-Darwinian without imagination, metaphysics, poetry, conscience, or decency. For 'Natural Selection' has no moral significance: it deals with that part of evolution which has no purpose, no intelligence, and might more appropriately be called accidental selection, or better still, Unnatural Selection, since nothing is more unnatural than an accident. If it could be proved that the whole universe had been produced by such Selection, only fools and rascals could bear to live.

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

Two percent of the people think; three percent of the people think they think; and ninety-five percent of the people would rather die than think.

The nations morals are like its teeth, the more decayed they are the more it hurts to touch them.

When I was young I observed that nine out of every ten things I did were failures, so I did ten times more work

Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire...

The most striking result of our present system of farming out the national land and capital to private individuals has been the division of society into hostile classes, with large appetites and no dinners at one extreme, and large dinners no appetit

To endure the pain of living, we all drug ourselves more or less with gin, with literature, with superstitions, with romance, with idealism, political, sentimental, and moral, with every possible preparation of that universal hashish: imagination.

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

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

An Irishman's imagination never lets him alone, never convinces him, never satisfies him; but it makes him that he can't face reality nor deal with it nor handle it nor conquer it: he can only sneer at them that do, and be 'agreeable to strangers', like a good-for-nothing woman on the streets.

Great Britain and the United States are nations separated by a common language.