George Bernard Shaw Men Quotations [Page 2]

I can think of no other edifice constructed by man as altruistic as a lighthouse. They were built only to serve.

Nationalism must now be added to the refuse pile of superstitions. We are now citizens of the world, and the man who divides the race into elect Irishmen and reprobate foreign devils (especially Englishmen) had better live on the Blaskets where he can admire himself without disturbance.

A married man forms married habits and becomes dependent on marriage just as a sailor becomes dependent on the sea.

Geniuses are horrid, intolerant, easily offended, sleeplessly self-conscious men, who expect their wives to be angels with no further business in life than to pet and worship their husbands. Even at the best they are not comfortable men to live with; and a perfect husband is one who is perfectly comfortable to live with.

It is in the hour of trial that a man finds his true profession.

The reasonable man will adjust to the demands of his environment. The unreasonable man expects his environment to adjust to his own needs. Therefore, all progress depends upon the unreasonable man.

Give me the artist who breathes it like a native, and goes about his work in it as quietly as a common man goes about his ordinary business. Mozart did so; and that is why I like him. Even if I did not, I should pretend to; for a taste in his music is a mark of caste among musicians, and should be worn, like a tall hat, by the amateur who wishes to pass for a true Brahmin.

Every man is a revolutionist concerning the thing he understands. For example, every person who has mastered a profession is a skeptic concerning it, and consequently a revolutionist.

We are more gullible and superstitious today than we were in the Middle Ages, and an example of modern credulity is the widespread belief that the Earth is round. The average man can advance not a single reason for thinking that the Earth is round. He merely swallows this theory because there is something about it that appeals to the twentieth century mentality.

It is the first duty of every man not to be poor.

The righteous man takes his life in his hand whenever he utters the truth.

The more ignorant men are, the more convinced are they that their little parish and their little chapel is an apex to which civilization and philosophy has painfully struggled up the pyramid of time from a desert of savagery.

Some persons, by hating vice too much, come to love men too little. Hatred is self-punishment. Hatred is the cowards revenge for being intimidated.

God's trustiest lieutenants often lack official credentials. They may be professed atheists who are also men of honour and high public spirit.

Liquor is the chloroform which enables the poor man to endure the painful operation of living.

Like all young men, you greatly exaggerate the difference between one young woman and another.

A learned man is an idler who kills time by study.

Thus, I blush to add, you can not be a philosopher and a good man, though you may be a philosopher and a great one.

Physically there is nothing to distinguish human society from the farm-yard except that children are more troublesome and costly than chickens and calves and that men and women are not so completely enslaved as farm stock.

A man learns to skate by staggering about and making a fool of himself. Indeed he progresses in all things by resolutely making a fool of himself.

I like a bit of mongrel myself, whether it's a man or a dog.

You know well I couldn't bear to live with a low common man after you two; and it's wicked and cruel of you to insult me by pretending I could.

I have never thought much of the courage of a lion tamer. Inside the cage he is at least safe from other men. There is not much harm in a lion. He has no ideals, no religion, no politics, no chivalry, no gentility; in short, no reason for destroying anything that he does not want to eat

It is a woman's business to get married as soon as possible, and a man's to keep unmarried as long as he can.

HIGGINS. Have you no morals, man? DOOLITTLE [unabashed] Cant afford them, Governor. Neither could you if you was as poor as me.

A healthy nation is as unconscious of its nationality as a healthy man of his bones. But if you break a person's nationality it will think of nothing else but getting it set again.

Hell is paved with good intentions, not with bad ones. All men mean well.

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

You must not suppose, because I am a man of letters, that I never tried to earn an honest living.

Has fear ever held a man back from anything he really wanted?

Any man who is not a communist at the age of twenty is a fool. Any man who is still a communist at the age of thirty is an even bigger fool.

A man ought to be able to be fond of his wife without making a fool of himself about her.

A man thinking or working is always alone, let him be where he will.

My situation is a solemn one: life is offered to me on the condition of eating beefsteaks. But death is better than cannibalism. My will contains directions for my funeral, which will be followed, not by mourning coaches, but by oxen, sheep, flocks of poultry, and a small traveling aquarium of live fish, all wearing white scarves in honor of the man who perished rather than eat his fellow creatures. It will be, without the exception of Noah's Ark, the most remarkable thing of its kind ever seen.

My friend, when a man has anything to tell in this world, the difficulty is not to make him tell it, but to prevent him from telling it too often.

People have pointed out evidences of personal feeling in my notices as if they were accusing me of a misdemeanor, not knowing that criticism written without personal feeling is not worth reading. It is the capacity for making good or bad art a personal matter that makes a man a critic.

I am very sorry, but I cannot learn languages. I have tried hard, only to find that men of ordinary capacity can learn Sanskrit in less time that it takes me to buy a German Dictionary

The policy of letting things alone, in the practical sense that the Government should never interfere with business or go into business itself, is called Laisser-faire by economists and politicians. It has broken down so completely in practice that it is now discredited; but it was all the fashion in politics a hundred years ago, and is still influentially advocated by men of business and their backers who naturally would like to be allowed to make money as they please without regard to the interest of the public.

What God hath joined together no man shall put asunder: God will take care of that.

Reasonable men adapt themselves to their environment; unreasonable men try to adapt their environment to themselves. Thus all progress is the result of the efforts of unreasonable men.

Democracy is a word all public men use and none understand.

The American Constitution, one of the few modern political documents drawn up by men who were forced by the sternest circumstances to think out what they really had to face, instead of chopping logic in a university classroom.

Religion is a great force - the only real motive force in the world; but what you fellows don't understand is that you must get at a man through his own religion and not through yours.

I can't talk religion to a man with bodily hunger in his eyes.

A man's own self is the last person to believe in him, and is harder to cheat than the rest of the world.

The savage bows down to idols of wood and stone, the civilized man to idols of flesh and blood

A moderately honest man with a moderately faithful wife, moderate drinkers both, in a moderately healthy house: that is the true middle class unit.

A drama critic is a man who leaves no turn unstoned.

When the military man approaches, the world locks up its spoons and packs off its womankind.

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 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.

A man's interest in the world is only an overflow from his interest in himself.

What man really wishes to do he will find a means of doing.

The business man - the man to whom age brings golf instead of wisdom.

There is in man a specific lust for cruelty which infects even his passion of pity and makes it savage.

I occasionally swank a little because people like it; a modest man is such a nuisance.

There are no perfectly honorable men; but every true man has one main point of honor and a few minor ones.

Life is too short for men to take it seriously.

A man is like a phonograph with half-a-dozen records. You soon get tired of them all; and yet you have to sit at table whilst he reels them off to every new visitor.

Get married, but never to a man who is home all day.

The educated man is a greater nuisance than the uneducated one.

I prefer the man who calls his nonsense a mystery to him who who pretends it is a weighed, measured, analyzed fact.

What is really important in Man is the part of him that we do not understand. Of much of it we are not even conscious, just as we are not normally conscious of keeping up our circulation by our heart-pump, though if we neglect it we die.

Of all human struggles there is none so treacherous and remorseless as the struggle between the artist man and the mother woman.

The conversion of Paul was no conversion at all; it was Paul who converted the religion that has raised one man above sin and death.

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

The one point on which all women are in furious secret rebellion against the existing law is the saddling of the right to a child with the obligation to become the servant of a man.

The surest way to ruin a man who doesn't know how to handle money is to give him some.

The censorship method ... is that of handing the job over to some frail and erring mortal man, and making him omnipotent on the assumption that his official status will make him infallible and omniscient.

The salvation of the world depends on the men who will not take evil good-humouredly, and whose laughter destroys the fool instead of encouraging him.

A love affair should always be a honeymoon. And the only way to make sure of that is to keep changing the man; for the same man can never keep it up.

In truth , mankind cannot be saved from without, by schoolmasters or any other sort of masters: it can only be lamed and enslaved by them. It is said that if you wash a cat it will never again wash itself. This may or may not be true : what is certain is that if you teach a man anything he will never learn it; and if you cure him of a disease he will be unable to cure himself the next time it attacks him.

It is quite useless to declare that all men are born free if you deny that they are born good . Guarantee a man's goodness and his liberty will take care of itself. To guarantee his freedom on condition that you approve of his moral character is formally to abolish all freedom whatsoever, as every man's liberty is at the mercy of a moral indictment which any fool can trump up against everyone who violates custom, whether as a prophet or as a rascal.

In a stupid nation the man of genius becomes a god : everybody worships him and nobody does his will.

Have you ever met a man of good character where women are concerned?

Any sort of plain speaking is better than the nauseous sham good fellowship our democratic public men get up for shop use.

Have you no morals, man?' 'Can't afford them,Governor.

Women are not angels. They are as foolish as men in many ways; but they have had to devote themselves to life whilst men have had to devote themselves to death; and that makes a vital difference in male and female religion. Women have been forced to fear whilst men have been forced to dare: the heroism of a woman is to nurse and protect life, and of a man to destroy it and court death.

Plato long ago pointed out the importance of being governed by men with sufficient sense of responsibility and comprehension of public duties to be very reluctant to undertake the work of governing.

A man's behaviour may be quite harmless and even beneficial, when he ismorally behaving like a scoundrel. And he may do great harm when he is morally acting on the highest principles.

A critic recently described me, with deadly acuteness, as having 'a kindly dislike of my fellow-creatures.' Perhaps dread would have been nearer the mark than dislike; for man is the only animal of which I am thoroughly and cravenly afraid.

I am very subtle; but Man is deeper in his thought than I am. The woman knows that there is no such thing as nothing: the man knows that there is no such day as tomorrow. I do well to worship them.

In the arts of peace Man is a bungler.

The body was the slave of the vortex; but the slave has become the master; and we must free ourselves from that tyranny. It is this stuff [ indicating her body ], this flesh and blood and bone and all the rest of it, that is intolerable. Even prehistoric man dreamed of what he called an astral body, and asked who would deliver him from the body of this death.

You can lose a man like that by your own death, but not by his.

No man fully capable of his own language ever masters another.

A man who desires to get married should know everything or nothing.

I'm one of the undeserving poor: that's what I am. Think of what that means to a man. It means that he's up agen middle class morality all the time.... What is middle class morality? Just an excuse for never giving me anything.

A man of great common sense and good taste - meaning thereby a man without originality or moral courage.

Nothing makes a man so selfish as work.

A day's work is a day's work, neither more nor less, and the man or woman who does it needs a day's sustenance, a night's repose and due leisure, whether they be painter or ploughman.

Men trifle with their business and their politics but never trifle with their games. It brings truth home to them. They cannot pretend they have won when they have lost nor that they had a magnificent drive when they foozled it. The Englishman is at his best on the links and at his worst in the Cabinet.

It is a noteworthy fact that kicking and beating have played so considerable a part in the habits which necessity has imposed on mankind in past ages that the only way of preventing civilized men from beating and kicking their wives is to organize games in which they can kick and beat balls.

Leisure may be defined as free activity, labor as compulsory activity. Leisure does what it likes, labor does what it must, the compulsion being that of Nature, which in these latitudes leaves men no choice between labor and starvation.

I believe that if a man like him were to assume the dictatorship of the modern world he would succeed in solving its problems in a way that would bring it the much needed peace and happiness: I have prophesied about the faith of Muhammad that it would be acceptable to the Europe of tomorrow as it is beginning to be acceptable to the Europe of today.

What a man is depends on his character; but what he does, and what we think of what he does, depends on his circumstances.

The worst cliques are those which consist of one man.

What really flatters a man is that you think him worth flattering.

Life is a disease; and the only difference between on man and another is the stage of the disease at which he lives.

In the arts of life main invents nothing; but in the arts of death he outdoes Nature herself, and produces by chemistry and machinery all the slaughter of plague, pestilence and famine. ... There is nothing in Man's industrial machinery but his greed and sloth: his heart is in his weapons.