George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950,) often known at his insistence just as Bernard Shaw, was an Irish playwright, critic, and polemicist. He is considered the greatest English-language playwright after Shakespeare.
Born in Dublin to Anglo-Irish Protestant parents, Shaw left school at 16, moved to London, and got into politics in his twenties as a socialist. He devoted many years to becoming a novelist but was a great failure. He found work as a theater-, art-, and music-critic, and set about to develop the performers’ standards and his audiences’ artistic tastes.
Shaw then turned to write plays. During a long and celebrated career, he wrote more than 50 plays, including Man and Superman (1902,) Major Barbara (1905,) and Saint Joan (1923.) His most famous play was Pygmalion (1912,) on the subject of a cockney girl who learns to become respectable in the high society of Edwardian London. This novel became the source for the musical and the movie My Fair Lady (1964.)
Shaw was provocatively opinionated and gained a reputation as a witty and sharp public speaker. Oscar Wilde once said of Shaw, “he has no enemies; and none of his friends like him.”
Shaw’s range of interest and inquiry included vivisection, vegetarianism, religion, language, cinema, and photography.
Shaw won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1925 and an Oscar in 1938 for his contribution to the musical film My Fair Lady, becoming the first person to have been awarded both a Nobel Prize and an Oscar.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by George Bernard Shaw
Dying is a troublesome business: there is pain to be suffered, and it wrings one’s heart; but death is a splendid thing—a warfare accomplished, a beginning all over again, a triumph. You can always see that in their faces.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Nature, Death
Assassination is the extreme form of censorship.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Censorship
Take care to get what you like or you will be forced to like what you get. Where there is no ventilation fresh air is declared unwholesome. Where there is no religion hypocrisy becomes good taste. Where there is no knowledge ignorance calls itself science.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: One liners, Hypocrisy
England and America are two countries separated by the same language.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: America, Language
You have set up in New York Harbor a monstrous idol which you call Liberty. The only thing that remains to complete that monument is to put on its pedestal the inscription written by Dante on the gate of hell: All hope abandon ye who enter here.
—George Bernard Shaw
I do not want actors and actresses to understand my plays. That is not necessary. If they will only pronounce the correct sounds I can guarantee the results.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Acting
I can forgive Alfred Nobel for having invented dynamite, but only a fiend in human form could have invented the Nobel Prize.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Evil
Man is the only animal which esteems itself rich in proportion to the number and voracity of its parasites.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Servants
There are two tragedies in life. One is to lose your heart’s desire. The other is to gain it.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Success is not everything
Do not do unto others as you would that they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Giving, Charity
A learned man is an idler who kills time with study. Beware of his false knowledge : it is more dangerous than ignorance.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Knowledge, Education
My father must have had some elementary education for he could read and write and keep accounts inaccurately
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Fathers, Father
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.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Acting, Actors
Morality is suspecting other people of not being legally married.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Morality, Morals
The unconscious self is the real genius. Your breathing goes wrong the moment your conscious self meddles with it.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: The Unconscious Self
Every genuinely benevolent person loathes almsgiving and mendicity.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Charity
Virtue consists, not in abstaining from vice, but in not desiring it.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Virtues and Vices, Virtues, Virtue
There is no satisfaction in hanging a man who does not object to it.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Satisfaction
Self-denial is not a virtue, it is only the effect of prudence on rascality.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Sacrifice, Self-Discovery
The love of fairplay is a spectator’s virtue, not a principal’s.
—George Bernard Shaw
It’s so hard to know what to do when one wishes earnestly to do right.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Wishes
I feel nothing but the accursed happiness I have dreaded all my life long: the happiness that comes as life goes, the happiness of yielding and dreaming instead of resisting and doing, the sweetness of the fruit that is going rotten.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Retirement
Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire; you will what you imagine; and at last you create what you will.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Imagination
Imprisonment is as irrevocable as death.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Crime and Punishment
Man can climb to the highest summits but he cannot dwell there long.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Achievement, Man, Success & Failure
Those who understand evil pardon it : those who resent it destroy it.
—George Bernard Shaw
Our ideals, like the gods of old, are constantly demanding human sacrifices.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Ideals
He didn’t dare to, because his father had a weak heart and habitually threatened to drop dead if anybody hurt his feelings. You may have noticed that people with weak hearts are the tyrants of English married life.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Family
A perpetual holiday is a good working definition of hell.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Hell
A Native American elder once described his own inner struggles in this manner: Inside of me there are two dogs. One of the dogs is mean and evil. The other dog is good. The mean dog fights the good dog all the time. When asked which dog wins, he reflected for a moment and replied, The one I feed the most. On Other Peoples Expectations: The only man who behaved sensibly was my tailor; he took my measurement anew every time he saw me, while all the rest went on with their old measurements and expected them to fit me.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Conflict, Change, Wisdom, Originality
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
William Butler Yeats Irish Poet
George William Russell Irish Author
Oscar Wilde Irish Poet, Playwright
Maurice Maeterlinck Belgian Dramatist
Brendan Behan Irish Poet
Oliver Goldsmith Anglo-Irish Novelist, Poet
Richard Brinsley Sheridan Irish-born British Playwright
Robertson Davies Canadian Novelist, Playwright
Elizabeth Bowen Irish Novelist
Edmund Burke British Philosopher, Statesman