George Bernard Shaw Ali Quotations

Socialism is the same as Communism, only better English.

Remember that you are a human being with a soul and the divine gift of articulate speech: that your native language is the language of Shakespeare and Milton and The Bible; and don't sit there crooning like a bilious pigeon.

In order to fully realize how bad a popular play can be, it is necessary to see it twice.

Women upset everything. When you let them into your life, you find that the woman is driving at one thing and you're driving at another.

The quality of a play is the quality of its ideas.

The difference between a lady and a flower girl is not how she behaves, but how she’s treated.

What is life but a series of inspired follies? The difficulty is to find them to do. Never lose a chance: it doesn’t come every day.

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

All religions begin with a revolt against morality, and perish when morality conquers them.

The great secret...is not having bad manners or good manners...but having the same manner for all human souls.

Happy is the man who can make a living by his hobby

Self-control is the quality that distinguishes the fittest to survive.

Trade unionism is not socialism. It is the capitalism of the proletariat.

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.

Custom will reconcile people to any atrocity, and fashion will drive them to acquire any custom.

I also made it quite clear that Socialism means equality of income or nothing, and that under socialism you would not be allowed to be poor. You would be forcibly feed, clothed, lodged, taught, and employed whether you like it or not. If it were discovered that you had not character enough to be worth all this trouble, you might possibly be executed in a kindly manner; but whilst you were permitted to live you would have to live well.

If you can’t appreciate what you’ve got, you’d better get what you can appreciate.

Life at its noblest leaves mere happiness far behind; and indeed cannot endure it. Happiness is not the object of life: life has no object: it is an end in itself; and courage consists in the readiness to sacrifice happiness for an intenser quality of life.

I don't want to talk grammar. I want to talk like a lady.

Golf is typical capitalist luncay.

Morality is not respectability.

I don't believe in morality . I'm a disciple of Bernard Shaw.

Journalists are too poorly paid in this country to know anything that is fit for publication.

It is ridiculous to say that art has nothing to do with morality. What is true is that the artist's business is not that of the policeman.

Justice is impartiality. Only strangers are impartial.

With the exception of capitalism, there is nothing so revolting as revolution.

If 'Pygmalion' is not good enough for your friends with its own verbal music, their talent must be altogether extraordinary.

Vitality is a woman is a blind fury of creation.

Am reserving two tickets for you for my premiere. Come and bring a friend - if you have one. Telegram inviting Winston Churchill to opening night of Pygmalion. Churchill wired back: Impossible to be present for the first performance. Will attend the second - if there is one.

It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman hate or despise him.

What the world calls originality is only an unaccustomed method of tickling it.

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

Morality consists of suspecting other people of not being legally married.

Decency cannot be discussed without indecency!

I sold flowers. I didn't sell myself. Now you've made a lady of me I'm not fit to sell anything else.

War does not decide who is right but who is left.

The word morality, if we met it in the Bible, would surprise us as much as the word telephone or motor car.

What is life but a series of inspired follies...

The great secret, Eliza, is not having bad manners or good manners or any other particular sort of manners, but having the same manner for all human souls: in short, behaving as if you were in Heaven, where there are no thirdclass carriages, and one soul is as good as another.

Few of us have vitality enough to make any of our instincts imperious.

An Englishman thinks he is moral when he is only uncomfortable.

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

Instead of Otello being an Italian opera written in the style of Shakespeare, Othello is a play written by Shakespeare in the style of Italian opera.

Martyrdom is the only path to immortality that requires no talent whatsoever.

An English army led by an Irish general: that might be a match for a French army led by an Italian general.

Bourgeois morality is largely a system of making cheap virtues a cloak for expensive vices.

We should have had socialism already, but for the socialists.

When I speak of The Case for Equality I mean human equality; and that, of course, can only mean one thing: it means equality of income.

I claim to be a conscientiously immoral writer.

He who slays a king and He who dies for him are alike idolaters

Morality is suspecting other people of not being legally married.

Morality consists in suspecting other people of not being legally married

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

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

The minority is sometimes right; the majority always wrong.

There are only 2 qualities in the world: efficiency and inefficiency, and only 2 sorts of people: the efficient and the inefficient.

A socialist is somebody who doesn't have anything, and is ready to divide it up equally among everybody.

Between persons of equal income there is no social distinction except the distinction of merit. Money is nothing: character, conduct, and capacity are everything. There would be great people and ordinary people and little people, but the great would always be those who had done great things, and never the idiots whose mothers had spoiled them and whose fathers had left them a hundred thousand a year; and the little would be persons of small minds and mean characters, and not poor persons who had never had a chance. That is why idiots are always in favor of inequality of income (their only chance of eminence), and the really great in favor of equality.

If you go to Heaven without being naturally qualified for it, you will not enjoy yourself there