George Bernard Shaw Gen Quotations

Money is the most important thing in the world. It represents health, strength, honor, generosity, and beauty as conspicuously as the want of it represents illness, weakness, disgrace, meanness, and ugliness.

A man of genius is not a man who sees more than other men do. On the contrary, it is very often found that he is absentminded andobserves much less than other people.... Why is it that the public have such an exaggerated respect for him--after he is dead? The reason is that the man of genius understands the importance of the few things he sees.

It is the mark of a truly intelligent person to be moved by statistics.

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

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

At present, intelligent people do not have their children vaccinated, nor does the law now compel them to. The result is not, as the Jennerians prophesied, the extermination of the human race by smallpox; on the contrary more people are now killed by vaccination than by smallpox.

It's all that the young can do for the old, to shock them and keep them up to date.

Make money and the whole nation will conspire to call you a gentleman.

Ladies and gentleman are permitted to have friends in the kennel, but not in the kitchen.

If the announcer can produce the impression that he is a gentleman, he may pronounce as he pleases.

You can rave about Stravinsky without the slightest risk of being classified as a lunatic by the next generation .

I am a brigand: I live by robbing the rich.' 'I am a gentleman: I live by robbing the poor.

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.

Nobody can say a word against Greek: it stamps a man at once as an educated gentlemen.

When a man teaches something he does not know to somebody else who has no aptitude for it, and gives him a certificate of proficiency, the latter has completed the education of a gentleman.

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?

I like to quote myself frequently and often, it makes me sound much more intelligent than I actually am.

Schools must not become the agencies through which propaganda advocated by any section of society is spread. The method of control always a crucial problem should be in harmony with the fundamental values and principles of the states and the entire e

I find that socialism is often misunderstood by its least intelligent supporters and opponents to mean simply unrestrained indulgence of our natural propensity to heave bricks at respectable persons.

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.

I am a gentleman: I live by robbing the poor.

A genius can't be forced; nor can you make an ape an alderman.

If the announcer can produce the impression that he is a gentlemen, he may pronounce as he pleases.

A part of eugenic politics would finally land us in an extensive use of the lethal chamber. A great many people would have to be put out of existence simply because it wastes other people's time to look after them.

There is not one single established religion that an intelligent, educated man can believe.