Quotes by George Shaw

• The perfect love affair is one which is conducted entirely by post.
• The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want and if they can't find them, make them.
• The only way to avoid being miserable is not to have enough leisure to wonder whether you are happy or not.
• The only service a friend can really render is to keep up your courage by holding up to you a mirror in which you can see a noble image of yourself.
• The only secrets are the secrets that keep themselves.
• The natural term of the affection of the human animal for its offspring is six years.
• The moment we want to believe something, we suddenly see all the arguments for it, and become blind to the arguments against it.
• The possibilities are numerous once we decide to act and not react.
• The man with a toothache thinks everyone happy whose teeth are sound. The poverty-stricken man makes the same mistake about the rich man.
• The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.
• The minority is sometimes right; the majority always wrong.
• The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it.
• Science never solves a problem without creating ten more.
• The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and about all time.
• The secret to success is to offend the greatest number of people.
• The frontier between hell and heaven is only the difference between two ways of looking at things.
• The test of a man or woman's breeding is how they behave in a quarrel.
• The things most people want to know about are usually none of their business.
• The trouble with her is that she lacks the power of conversation but not the power of speech.
• The truth is, hardly any of us have ethical energy enough for more than one really inflexible point of honor.
• The secret of being miserable is to have leisure to bother about whether you are happy or not. The cure for it is occupation.
• The British soldier can stand up to anything except the British War Office.
• Self-sacrifice enables us to sacrifice other people without blushing.
• She had lost the art of conversation but not, unfortunately, the power of speech.
• Silence is the most perfect expression of scorn.
• Socialism is the same as Communism, only better English.
• Some look at things that are, and ask why. I dream of things that never were and ask why not?
• Statistics show that of those who contract the habit of eating, very few survive.
• Success does not consist in never making mistakes but in never making the same one a second time.
• Syllables govern the world.
• Take care to get what you like or you will be forced to like what you get.
• The great advantage of a hotel is that it is a refuge from home life.
• The best place to find God is in a garden. You can dig for him there.
• The love of economy is the root of all virtue.
• The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one.
• The faults of the burglar are the qualities of the financier.
• The fickleness of the women I love is only equalled by the infernal constancy of the women who love me.
• The first condition of progress is the removal of censorship.
• There is only one religion, though there are a hundred versions of it.
• The golden rule is that there are no golden rules.
• There are no secrets better kept than the secrets everybody guesses.
• The heretic is always better dead. And mortal eyes cannot distinguish the saint from the heretic.
• The liar's punishment is not in the least that he is not believed, but that he cannot believe anyone else.
• The art of government is the organisation of idolatry.
• You cannot be a hero without being a coward.
• There is no subject on which more dangerous nonsense is talked and thought than marriage.
• When a man says money can do anything, that settles it: he hasn't got any.
• When a man wants to murder a tiger he calls it sport; when a tiger wants to murder him he calls it ferocity.
• When a stupid man is doing something he is ashamed of, he always declares that it is his duty.
• When I was young, I observed that nine out of ten things I did were failures. So I did ten times more work.
• Which painting in the National Gallery would I save if there was a fire? The one nearest the door of course.
• Why should we take advice on sex from the pope? If he knows anything about it, he shouldn't!
• Why, except as a means of livelihood, a man should desire to act on the stage when he has the whole world to act in, is not clear to me.
• Without art, the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable.
• What is virtue but the Trade Unionism of the married?
• You can always tell an old soldier by the inside of his holsters and cartridge boxes. The young ones carry pistols and cartridges; the old ones, grub.
• What Englishman will give his mind to politics as long as he can afford to keep a motor car?
• You see things; and you say "Why?" But I dream things that never were; and I say "Why not?"
• You use a glass mirror to see your face; you use works of art to see your soul.
• A broken heart is a very pleasant complaint for a man in London if he has a comfortable income.
• A fashion is nothing but an induced epidemic.
• A fool's brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence University education.
• A gentleman is one who puts more into the world than he takes out.
• You'll never have a quiet world till you knock the patriotism out of the human race.
• Youth is a wonderful thing. What a crime to waste it on children.
• Youth is wasted on the young.
• You are going to let the fear of poverty govern you life and your reward will be that you will eat, but you will not live.
• We are all dependent on one another, every soul of us on earth.
• There is no satisfaction in hanging a man who does not object to it.
• There is no sincerer love than the love of food.
• Only on paper has humanity yet achieved glory, beauty, truth, knowledge, virtue, and abiding love.
• There is nothing more dangerous than the conscience of a bigot.
• Parentage is a very important profession, but no test of fitness for it is ever imposed in the interest of the children.
• Those who do not know how to live must make a merit of dying.
• Until the men of action clear out the talkers we who have social consciences are at the mercy of those who have none.
• Use your health, even to the point of wearing it out. That is what it is for. Spend all you have before you die; do not outlive yourself.
• Very few people can afford to be poor.
• What we want is to see the child in pursuit of knowledge, and not knowledge in pursuit of the child.
• Virtue is insufficient temptation.
• There are two tragedies in life. One is to lose your heart's desire. The other is to gain it.
• We are made wise not by the recollection of our past, but by the responsibility for our future.
• We are the only real aristocracy in the world: the aristocracy of money.
• We don't stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing.
• We have no more right to consume happiness without producing it than to consume wealth without producing it.
• We learn from experience that men never learn anything from experience.
• We must always think about things, and we must think about things as they are, not as they are said to be.
• We should all be obliged to appear before a board every five years and justify our existence... on pain of liquidation.
• What a man believes may be ascertained, not from his creed, but from the assumptions on which he habitually acts.
• Kings are not born: they are made by artificial hallucination.
• Virtue consists, not in abstaining from vice, but in not desiring it.
• A perpetual holiday is a good working definition of hell.
• I enjoy convalescence. It is the part that makes the illness worth while.
• I dislike feeling at home when I am abroad.
• A government that robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.
• A happy family is but an earlier heaven.
• A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.
• A little learning is a dangerous thing, but we must take that risk because a little is as much as our biggest heads can hold.
• A man never tells you anything until you contradict him.
• In this world there is always danger for those who are afraid of it.
• 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 conception.
• I never resist temptation, because I have found that things that are bad for me do not tempt me.
• A veteran journalist has never had time to think twice before he writes.
• Reading made Don Quixote a gentleman, but believing what he read made him mad.
• All great truths begin as blasphemies.
• Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.
• Americans adore me and will go on adoring me until I say something nice about them.
• An asylum for the sane would be empty in America.
• An election is a moral horror, as bad as a battle except for the blood; a mud bath for every soul concerned in it.
• An Englishman thinks he is moral when he is only uncomfortable.
• A man of great common sense and good taste - meaning thereby a man without originality or moral courage.
• If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience.
• In heaven an angel is nobody in particular.
• In a battle all you need to make you fight is a little hot blood and the knowledge that it's more dangerous to lose than to win.
• Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine and at last you create what you will.
• If you must hold yourself up to your children as an object lesson, hold yourself up as a warning and not as an example.
• If you leave the smallest corner of your head vacant for a moment, other people's opinions will rush in from all quarters.
• If you injure your neighbour, better not do it by halves.
• If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance.
• If you can't get rid of the skeleton in your closet, you'd best teach it to dance.
• I have to live for others and not for myself: that's middle-class morality.
• If there was nothing wrong in the world there wouldn't be anything for us to do.
• I learned long ago, never to wrestle with a pig. You get dirty, and besides, the pig likes it.
• If all the economists were laid end to end, they'd never reach a conclusion.
• I'm an atheist and I thank God for it.
• I would like to take you seriously, but to do so would be an affront to your intelligence.
• I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake.
• I want to be all used up when I die.
• I often quote myself. It adds spice to my conversation.
• I never thought much of the courage of a lion tamer. Inside the cage he is at least safe from people.
• Assassination is the extreme form of censorship.
• If women were particular about men's characters, they would never get married at all.
• Give a man health and a course to steer, and he'll never stop to trouble about whether he's happy or not.
• An index is a great leveller.
• Every person who has mastered a profession is a skeptic concerning it.
• Everything happens to everybody sooner or later if there is time enough.
• Except during the nine months before he draws his first breath, no man manages his affairs as well as a tree does.
• Fashions, after all, are only induced epidemics.
• Few of us have vitality enough to make any of our instincts imperious.
• Few people think more than two or three times a year; I have made an international reputation for myself by thinking once or twice a week.
• Find enough clever things to say, and you're a Prime Minister; write them down and you're a Shakespeare.
• England and America are two countries separated by the same language.
• General consultant to mankind.
• Do not waste your time on Social Questions. What is the matter with the poor is Poverty; what is the matter with the rich is Uselessness.
• He knows nothing and thinks he knows everything. That points clearly to a political career.
• He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches.
• He's a man of great common sense and good taste - meaning thereby a man without originality or moral courage.
• Hegel was right when he said that we learn from history that man can never learn anything from history.
• Hell is full of musical amateurs.
• Home life is no more natural to us than a cage is natural to a cockatoo.
• Human beings are the only animals of which I am thoroughly and cravenly afraid.
• I am a Christian. That obliges me to be a Communist.
• First love is only a little foolishness and a lot of curiosity.
• Choose silence of all virtues, for by it you hear other men's imperfections, and conceal your own.
• Alcohol is the anesthesia by which we endure the operation of life.
• Baseball has the great advantage over cricket of being sooner ended.
• Beauty is a short-lived tyranny.
• Beauty is all very well at first sight; but who ever looks at it when it has been in the house three days?
• Better keep yourself clean and bright; you are the window through which you must see the world.
• Better never than late.
• Beware of false knowledge; it is more dangerous than ignorance.
• Beware of the man who does not return your blow: he neither forgives you nor allows you to forgive yourself.
• Every man over forty is a scoundrel.
• Censorship ends in logical completeness when nobody is allowed to read any books except the books that nobody reads.
• Animals are my friends... and I don't eat my friends.
• Clever and attractive women do not want to vote; they are willing to let men govern as long as they govern men.
• Cruelty would be delicious if one could only find some sort of cruelty that didn't really hurt.
• Dancing is a perpendicular expression of a horizontal desire.
• Democracy is a device that insures we shall be governed no better than we deserve.
• Democracy is a form of government that substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few.
• Democracy substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few.
• Do not do unto others as you expect they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same.
• Do not try to live forever. You will not succeed.
• Capitalism has destroyed our belief in any effective power but that of self interest backed by force.
• I am afraid we must make the world honest before we can honestly say to our children that honesty is the best policy.
• Martyrdom: The only way a man can become famous without ability.
• Marriage is popular because it combines the maximum of temptation with the maximum of opportunity.
• Marriage is good enough for the lower classes: they have facilities for desertion that are denied to us.
• Marriage is an alliance entered into by a man who can't sleep with the window shut, and a woman who can't sleep with the window open.
• Man can climb to the highest summits, but he cannot dwell there long.
• Love is a gross exaggeration of the difference between one person and everybody else.
• Life would be tolerable but for its amusements.
• Life levels all men. Death reveals the eminent.
• Men are wise in proportion, not to their experience, but to their capacity for experience.
• Lack of money is the root of all evil.
• Life isn't about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.
• Just do what must be done. This may not be happiness, but it is greatness.
• It's so hard to know what to do when one wishes earnestly to do right.
• It's easier to replace a dead man than a good picture.
• It is the mark of a truly intelligent person to be moved by statistics.
• It is most unwise for people in love to marry.
• It is dangerous to be sincere unless you are also stupid.
• It is a curious sensation: the sort of pain that goes mercifully beyond our powers of feeling. When your heart is broken, your boats are burned: nothing matters any more. It is the end of happiness and the beginning of peace.
• Independence? That's middle class blasphemy. We are all dependent on one another, every soul of us on earth.
• All my life affection has been showered upon me, and every forward step I have made has been taken in spite of it.
• Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh.
• Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all others because you were born in it.
• Property is organized robbery.
• Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.
• Life contains but two tragedies. One is not to get your heart's desire; the other is to get it.
• Men have to do some awfully mean things to keep up their respectability.
• Political necessities sometime turn out to be political mistakes.
• Perhaps the greatest social service that can be rendered by anybody to the country and to mankind is to bring up a family.
• People who say it cannot be done should not interrupt those who are doing it.
• Peace is not only better than war, but infinitely more arduous.
• Power does not corrupt men; fools, however, if they get into a position of power, corrupt power.
• One man that has a mind and knows it can always beat ten men who haven't and don't.
• Old men are dangerous: it doesn't matter to them what is going to happen to the world.
• Never fret for an only son, the idea of failure will never occur to him.
• Miracles, in the sense of phenomena we cannot explain, surround us on every hand: life itself is the miracle of miracles.
• Most people do not pray; they only beg.
• People become attached to their burdens sometimes more than the burdens are attached to them.
• My reputation grows with every failure.
• No man ever believes that the Bible means what it says: He is always convinced that it says what he means.
• No man who is occupied in doing a very difficult thing, and doing it very well, ever loses his self-respect.
• No question is so difficult to answer as that to which the answer is obvious.
• Nothing is ever done in this world until men are prepared to kill one another if it is not done.
• Nothing is worth doing unless the consequences may be serious.
• Oh, the tiger will love you. There is no sincerer love than the love of food.