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
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
Justice is justice though it’s always delayed and finally done only y mistake.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Justice
We know now that the soul is the body, and the body the soul. They tell us they are different because they want to persuade us that we can keep our souls if we let them make slaves of our bodies.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Soul
You can be as romantic as you please about love, Hector; but you mustn’t be romantic about money
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Romance
Clever and attractive women do not want to vote; they are willing to let men govern as long as they govern men.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Elections, Voting
Death is for many of us the gate of hell; but we are inside on the way out, not outside on the way in.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Death
In gambling the many must lose in order that the few may win.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Gambling
Common people do not pray; they only beg.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Prayer
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.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Equality
I never thought much of the courage of a lion tamer. Inside the cage he is at least safe from people.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Courage, Bravery
The love of fairplay is a spectator’s virtue, not a principal’s.
—George Bernard Shaw
It is the mark of a truly intelligent person to be moved by statistics.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Intelligence
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.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Soldiers
Englishmen hate Liberty and Equality too much to understand them. But every Englishman loves a pedigree.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Ancestry, Ancestors
Disobedience, the rarest and most courageous of the virtues, is seldom distinguished from neglect, the laziest and commonest of the vices.
—George Bernard Shaw
The English have no respect for their language, and will not teach their children to speak it.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Language
An asylum for the sane would be empty in America.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Sanity
Put an Irishman on the spit and you can always get another Irishman to turn him.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Nationality, Nationalities, Nationalism, Nation
The problem with communication is the illusion that it has been achieved.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Communication
We have not lost faith, but we have transferred it from God to the medical profession.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Faith
Every genuinely benevolent person loathes almsgiving and mendicity.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Charity
The seven deadly sins… food, clothing, firing, rent, taxes, respectability and children. Nothing can lift those seven millstones from Man’s neck but money; and the spirit cannot soar until the millstones are lifted.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Poverty
Our laws make law impossible; our liberties destroy all freedom; our property is organized robbery; our morality an impudent hypocrisy; our wisdom is administered by inexperienced or mal-experienced dupes; our power wielded by cowards and weaklings; and our honour false in all its points. I am an enemy of the existing order for good reasons
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Property, Hypocrisy
While we ourselves are the living graves of murdered beasts, how can we expect any ideal conditions on this earth?
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Vegetarianism
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
Experience fails to teach where there is no desire to learn.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Experience
The things most people want to know about are usually none of their business.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Knowledge, Gossip
We have no more right to consume happiness without producing it than to consume wealth without producing it.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Happiness, Service, Joy, Welfare, Consumerism
The camera can represent flesh so superbly that, if I dared, I would never photograph a figure without asking that figure to take its clothes off.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Photography
Would the world ever have been made if its maker had been afraid of making trouble? Making life means making trouble.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: World
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