George Bernard Shaw

“The Captain: A martyr, Lavinia, is a fool. Your death will prove nothing.Lavinia: Then why kill me?”

“No, really: I can't fight, I never could. I can't bring myself to dislike anyone enough.”

“Making Life means making trouble”

“Alguns homens vêem as coisas como são, e dizem 'Por quê?' Eu sonho com as coisas que nunca foram e digo 'Por que não ?”

“O matrimónio não é a loteria. Na loteria algumas vezes ganha-se.”

“If you want soldiers you must have children. You can't buy 'em in boxes, like toy soldiers.”

“Well, upon my soul! You are not ashamed to stand there and confess yourself a disgusting drunkard.”

“Hell, they says, is paved with good intentions.”

“That is what all the poets do: they talk to themselves outloud and the world overhears them. But it's horribly lonely not to hear someone else talk sometimes.”

“Oh, well, if you want original conversations, you'd better go and talk to yourself.”

“Wicked people means people who have no love: therefore, they have no shame. They have the power to ask love because the don't need it: they have the power to offer it because they have none to give.”

“The natural term of the affection of the human animal for its offspring is six years.”

“When our relatives are at home, we have to think of all their good points or it would be impossible to endure them. But when they are away, we console ourselves for their absence by dwelling on their vices.”

“Nobody could stand an eternity of Heaven.”

“Heaven is the most angelically dull place in all creation”

“Prirodzený čas, dokedy ľudský živočích pociťuje lásku ku svojim potomkom, je šesť rokov.”

“Doing what needs to be done may not make you happy, but it will make you great.”

“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.”

“If other people are going to talk, conversation becomes impossible.”

“Those who do not know how to live must make a merit of dying.”

“You may remember that on earth—though of course we never confessed it—the death of anyone we knew, even those we liked best, was always mingled with a certain satisfaction at being finally done with them.”

“I try to follow his example, not to imitate him.”

“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.”

“THE QUESTION seems a hopeless one after 2000 years of resoluteadherence to the old cry of “Not this man, but Barabbas.”Yet it is beginning to look as if Barabbas was a failure, inspite of his strong right hand, his victories, his empires, hismillions of money, and his moralities and churches and politicalconstitutions. “This man” has not been a failure yet;for nobody has ever been sane enough to try his way. But hehas had one quaint triumph. Barabbas has stolen his nameand taken his cross as a standard. There is a sort of complimentin that. There is even a sort of loyalty in it, like that ofthe brigand who breaks every law and yet claims to be apatriotic subject of the king who makes them. We have alwayshad a curious feeling that though we crucified Christon a stick, he somehow managed to get hold of the right endof it, and that if we were better men we might try his plan.There have been one or two grotesque attempts at it by inadequate people, such as the Kingdom of God in Munster,which was ended by crucifixion so much more atrocious thanthe one on Calvary that the bishop who took the part ofAnnas went home and died of horror. But responsible peoplehave never made such attempts. The moneyed, respectable,capable world has been steadily anti-Christian andBarabbasque since the crucifixion; and the specific doctrineof Jesus has not in all that time been put into political orgeneral social practice.”

“An author who gives a manager or publisher any rights in his work except those immediately and specifically required for its publication or performance is for business purposes an imbecile.”

“Greatness is one of the sensations of littleness”

“Life is not meant to be easy, my child; but take courage: it can be delightful.”

“Written over the gate here are the words 'Leave every hope behind, ye who enter.' Only think what a relief that is! For what is hope? A form of moral responsibility. Here there is no hope, and consequently no duty, no work, nothing to be gained by praying, nothing to be lost by doing what you like. Hell, in short is a place where you have nothing to do but amuse yourself.”

“People do not become great by doing great things. They do great things because they are great.”

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

“I find that socialism is often misunderstood by its least intelligent supporters and opponents to mean simply unrestrained indulgence of our natural propensity to heave bricks at respectable persons.”

“O God that madest this beautiful earth, when will it be ready to receive Thy saints? How long, O Lord, how long?”

“Don't think you can frighten me by telling me that I am alone. France is alone. God is alone. And the loneliness of God is His strength.”

“Postajemo mudri ne zbog toga što se prisećamo naše prošlosti, već što postajemo odgovorni za našu budućnost.”

“The ordinary man is an anarchist. He wants to do as he likes. He may want his neighbour to be governed, but he himself doesn't want to be governed. He is mortally afraid of government officials and policemen.”

“I am afraid we must make the world honest before we can honestly say to our children that honesty is the best policy.”

“I could do without my warhorse; I could drag about in a skirt; I could let the banners and the trumpets and the knights and soldiers pass me and leave me behind as they leave the other women, if only I could still hear the wind in the trees, the larks in the sunshine, the young lambs crying through the healthy frost, and the blessed blessed church bells that send my angel voices floating to me on the wind. But without these things I cannot live; and by your wanting to take them away from me, or from any human creature, I know that your counsel is of the devil, and that mine is of God.”

“The true artist will let his wife starve, his children go barefoot, his mother drudge for his living at seventy, sooner than work at anything but his art. To women he is half vivisector, half vampire. He gets into intimate relations with them to study them, to strip the mask of convention from them, to surprise their inmost secrets, knowing that they have the power to rouse his deepest creative energies, to rescue him from his cold reason, to make him see visions and dream dreams, to inspire him, as he calls it. He persuades women that they may do this for their own purpose whilst he really means them to do it for his. He steals the mother’s milk and blackens it to make printer’s ink to scoff at her and glorify ideal women with. He pretends to spare her the pangs of child-bearing so that he may have for himself the tenderness and fostering that belong of right to her children. Since marriage began, the great artist has been known as a bad husband. But he is worse: he is a child-robber, a blood-sucker, a hypocrite, and a cheat. Perish the race and wither a thousand women if only the sacrifice of them enable him to act Hamlet better, to paint a finer picture, to write a deeper poem, a greater play, a profounder philosophy! For mark you, Tavy, the artist’s work is to shew us ourselves as we really are. Our minds are nothing but this knowledge of ourselves; and he who adds a jot to such knowledge creates new mind as surely as any woman creates new men. In the rage of that creation he is as ruthless as the woman, as dangerous to her as she to him, and as horribly fascinating. Of all human struggles there is none so treacherous and remorseless as the struggle between the artist man and the mother woman. Which shall use up the other? that is the issue between them. And it is all the deadlier because, in your romanticist cant, they love one another.”

“Patriotism is a pernicious, psychopathic form of idiocy.”

“Baseball has the great advantage over cricket of being sooner ended. ”

“Decency cannot be discussed without indecency!”

“I sold flowers. I didn't sell myself. Now you've made a lady of me I'm not fit to sell anything else.”

“Heaven, as conventionally conceived, is a place so inane, so dull, so useless, so miserable that nobody has ever ventured to describe a whole day in heaven, though plenty of people have described a day at the seaside.”

“Suppose the world were only one of God's jokes, would you work any the less to make it a good joke instead of a bad one?”

“Schools and schoolmasters, as we have them today, are not popular as places of education and teachers, but rather prisons and turnkeys in which children are kept to prevent them disturbing and chaperoning their parent.”

“Do you think that the things people make fools of themselves about are any less real and true than the things they behave sensibly about? They are more true: they are the only things that are true.”

“I do not know what I think until I write it.”

“To be in hell is to drift; to be in heaven is to steer.”

“You don't stop laughing when you grow old, you grow old when you stop laughing.”

“Both optimists and pessimists contribute to society. The optimist invents the aeroplane, the pessimist the parachute.”