Quotations by Author

George Bernard Shaw

Yet I am faced with the flat fact that most of us (including myself) remember only the paradigms we have been taught in our childhood, however deeply we may philosophise in later life.

Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.

Love is a gross exaggeration of the difference between one person and everybody else.

Most people do not pray; they only beg.

No man ever believes that the Bible means what it says: He is always convinced that it says what he means.

Science... never solves a problem without creating ten more.

Why should we take advice on sex from the pope? If he knows anything about it, he shouldn't!

And so, to the end of history, murder shall breed murder, always in the name of right and honor and peace, until the gods are tired of blood and create a race that can understand.

Imagination is the beginning of creation.

There is only one religion, though there are a hundred versions of it.

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

”No man ever believes that the Bible means what it says; he is always convinced that it says what he means." "The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one. The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality."

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.

Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.

Why should we take advice on sex from the pope? If he knows anything about it, he shouldn't!

What is wrong with priests and popes is that instead of being apostles and saints, they are nothing but empirics who say "I know" instead of "I am learning," and pray for credulity and inertia as wise men pray for scepticism and activity.

Science becomes dangerous only when it imagines that it has reached its goal.

What bereaved people need is a little comic relief, and this is why funerals are so farcical.

All the sweetness of religion is conveyed to the world by the hands of storytellers and image-makers. Without their fictions the truths of religion would for the multitude be neither intelligible nor even apprehensible; and the prophets would prophesy and the teachers teach in vain.

In your Salvation shelter I saw poverty, misery, cold and hunger. You gave them bread and treacle and dreams of heaven. I give from thirty shillings a week to twelve thousand a year. They find their own dreams; but I look after the drainage

Think of the fierce energy concentrated in an acorn! You bury it in the ground, and it explodes into an oak! Bury a sheep, and nothing happens but decay

Animals are my friends... and I don't eat my friends

My situation is a solemn one. Life is offered to me on 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 scarfs in honor of the man who perished rather than eat his fellow creatures