I have a strong feeling that I shall be glad when I am dead and done for - scrapped at last to make room for somebody better, cleverer, more perfect than myself.
— George Bernard Shaw
If you're not producing as much as you consume, or perhaps a little more, then clearly we cannot use the big organization of our society for the purpose of keeping you alive, because your life does not benefit us, and it can't be of very much use to yourself.
All genuinely intellectual work is humorous.
Socialism never arises in the earlier phases of capitalism, as, for instance, among the pioneers of civilisation in a country where there is plenty of land available for private appropriation by the last comer.
What is the use of writing plays, what is the use of writing anything, if there is not a will which finally moulds chaos itself into a race of gods.
The Old Testament God is a person with body parts and passions. The Church of England God has neither body, parts nor passions, and is therefore not a person.
We are the only real aristocracy in the world: the aristocracy of money.
I am afraid we must make the world honest before we can honestly say to our children that honesty is the best policy.
What a man believes may be ascertained, not from his creed, but from the assumptions on which he habitually acts.
A man who has no office to go, to I don't care who he is, is a trial of which you can have no conception.
The heretic is always better dead. And mortal eyes cannot distinguish the saint from the heretic.
A veteran journalist has never had time to think twice before he writes.
There is no subject on which more dangerous nonsense is talked and thought than marriage.
There are no secrets better kept than the secrets everybody guesses.
While we ourselves are the living graves of murdered animals, how can we expect any ideal living conditions on this earth?
The frontier between hell and heaven is only the difference between two ways of looking at things.
Human beings are the only animals of which I am thoroughly and cravenly afraid.
In socialism, private property is anathema, and equal distribution of income the first consideration. In capitalism, private property is cardinal, and distribution left to ensue from the play of free contract and selfish interest on that basis, no matter what anomalies it may present.
The idea of personal salvation is intensely repugnant to me when it is not absurd. Imagine Roosevelt, the big brute, preserving his personality in a future state and swaggering about as a celestial Rough Rider!
My method of getting a play across the footlights is like a revolver shooting: every line has a bullet in it and comes with an explosion.
Socialism, reduced to its simplest legal and practical expression, means the complete discarding of the institution of private property by transforming it into public property, and the division of the resultant public income equally and indiscriminately among the entire population.
I want to destroy ownership in order that possession and enjoyment may be raised to the highest point in every section of the community.
The Nazi movement is in many respects one which has my warmest sympathy.
I have to live for others and not for myself: that's middle-class morality.
If women were particular about men's characters, they would never get married at all.
Until the men of action clear out the talkers we who have social consciences are at the mercy of those who have none.
Marriage is popular because it combines the maximum of temptation with the maximum of opportunity.
Virtue consists, not in abstaining from vice, but in not desiring it.
Old men are dangerous: it doesn't matter to them what is going to happen to the world.
There is nothing more dangerous than the conscience of a bigot.
If you leave the smallest corner of your head vacant for a moment, other people's opinions will rush in from all quarters.
Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all others because you were born in it.
I would like to take you seriously, but to do so would be an affront to your intelligence.
Just do what must be done. This may not be happiness, but it is greatness.
If I own a large part of Scotland, I can turn the people off the land practically into the sea or across the sea. I can take women in child-bearing and throw them into the snow and leave them there. That has been done. I can do it for no better reason than I think it is better to shoot deer on the land than allow people to live on it.
If a woman can, by careful selection of a father and nourishment of herself, produce a citizen with efficient senses, sound organs and a good digestion, she should clearly be secured a sufficient reward for that natural service to make her willing to undertake and repeat it.
A statesman who confines himself to popular legislation - or, for the matter of that, a playwright who confines himself to popular plays - is like a blind man's dog who goes wherever the blind man pulls him, on the ground that both of them want to go to the same place.
The only fundamental and possible socialism is the socialisation of the selective breeding of man.
Creation is a miracle of daily recurrence. 'A miracle a minute' would not be a bad slogan for God.
If I were a woman, I'd simply refuse to speak to any man or do anything for men until I'd got the vote.
It's easier to replace a dead man than a good picture.
When a man wants to murder a tiger he calls it sport; when a tiger wants to murder him he calls it ferocity.
Those who do not know how to live must make a merit of dying.
Marriage is good enough for the lower classes: they have facilities for desertion that are denied to us.
I am a Christian. That obliges me to be a Communist.
One man that has a mind and knows it can always beat ten men who haven't and don't.
Kings are not born: they are made by artificial hallucination.
We should all be obliged to appear before a board every five years and justify our existence... on pain of liquidation.
Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.
If there was nothing wrong in the world there wouldn't be anything for us to do.
