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
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
No man who is occupied in doing a very difficult thing, and doing it very well, ever loses his self-respect.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Talent, Self Respect, Self-respect
A drama critic is a man who leaves no turn unstoned.
—George Bernard Shaw
I make a fortune from criticizing the policy of the government, and then hand it over to the government in taxes to keep it going
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Criticism
Man is the only animal which esteems itself rich in proportion to the number and voracity of its parasites.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Servants
All censorships exist to prevent anyone from challenging current conceptions and existing institutions. All progress is initiated by challenging current conceptions, and executed by supplanting existing institutions. Consequently the first condition of progress is the removal of censorships. There is the whole case against censorships in a nutshell.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Progress, Censorship
The doctor learns that if he gets ahead of the superstitions of his patients he is a ruined man; and the result is that he instinctively takes care not to get ahead of them.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Doctors, Medicine
Decadence can find agents only when it wears the mask of progress.
—George Bernard Shaw
When it comes to the point, really bad men are just as rare as really good ones.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Crime
Beauty is all very well at first sight; but whoever looks at it when it has been in the house three days?
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Beauty
If you go to heaven without being naturally qualified for it, you will not enjoy it there.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Aptness, Appropriateness
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
Man gives every reason for his conduct save one, every excuse for his crimes save one, every plea for his safety save one; and that one is his cowardice.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Defects, Coward, Cowardice
The worst cliques are those which consist of one man.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Friendship
You have learned something. That always feels at first as if you had lost something.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Adversity, Difficulties
I was a freethinker before I knew how to think.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Thought, Thoughts
The fickleness of the women I love is only equalled by the infernal constancy of the women who love me.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Love
Go anywhere in England where there are natural, wholesome, contented, and really nice English people; and what do you always find? That the stables are the real center of the household.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Horses
All great truths begin as blasphemies.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Truth
There is no subject on which more dangerous nonsense is talked and thought than marriage.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Marriage
Life is a flame that is always burning itself out, but it catches fire again every time a child is born
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Pregnancy
If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Ideas, Love
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
Self-denial is not a virtue, it is only the effect of prudence on rascality.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Self-Discovery, Sacrifice
He who gives money he has not earned is generous with other people’s labor.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Charity
My father must have had some elementary education for he could read and write and keep accounts inaccurately
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Fathers, Father
The right to live is abused whenever it is not constantly challenged.
—George Bernard Shaw
My religion? Well, my dear, I am a Millionaire. That is my religion.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Religion
That is the whole secret of successful fighting. Get your enemy at a disadvantage; and never, on any account, fight him on equal terms.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Fight, Fighting
Lack of money is the root of all evil.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Money
The best reformers the world has ever seen are those who commence on themselves.
—George Bernard Shaw
Democracy substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Government, Democracy, Voting
The faults of the burglar are the qualities of the financier.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Crime
Two starving men cannot be twice as hungry as one; but two rascals can be ten times as vicious as one.
—George Bernard Shaw
Revolutions have never lightened the burden of tyranny: they have only shifted it to another shoulder.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Revolution, Revolutions
Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Miscellaneous, Change
It is difficult, if not impossible, for most people to think otherwise than in the fashion of their own period.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Thoughts, Thought
I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community and as long as I live, it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can. I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work the more I live.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Living, Work, Community
Common sense is instinct. Enough of it is genius.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Genius, Instincts, Common Sense
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
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