Mystics

"Never forget that if you leave your law to judges and your religion to bishops, you will presently find yourself without either law or religion."

"Love is an appetite which, like all other appetites, is destroyed for the moment by its gratification."

"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."

"When two people are under the influence of the most violent, most insane, most delusive, and most transient of passions, they are required to swear that they will remain in that excited, abnormal, and exhausting condition continuously until death do them part."

"Home life as we understand it is no more natural to us than a cage is natural to a cockatoo."

"There is no subject on which more dangerous nonsense is talked and thought than marriage. If the mischief stopped at talking and thinking it would be bad enough; but it goes further, into disastrous anarchical action. Because our marriage law is inhuman and unreasonable to the point of downright abomination, the bolder and more rebellious spirits form illicit unions, defiantly sending cards round to their friends announcing what they have done. Young women come to me and ask me whether I think they ought to consent to marry the man they have decided to live with; and they are perplexed and astonished when I, who am supposed (heaven knows why!) to have the most advanced views attainable on the subject, urge them on no account to compromise themselves without the security of an authentic wedding ring."

"My way of joking is to tell the truth. It's the funniest joke in the world."

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

"You cannot be a hero without being a coward."

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

"He knows nothing; and he thinks he knows everything. That points clearly to a political career."

"It is not the sale of my soul that troubles me: I have sold it too often to care about that. I have sold it for a professorship. I have sold it for an income. ... What is all human conduct but the daily and hourly sale of our souls for trifles?"

"You have learnt something. That always feels at first as if you had lost something."

"Undershaft: My religion? Well, my dear, I am a Millionaire. That is my religion."

"Cusins: Call you poverty a crime? Undershaft: The worst of crimes. All the other crimes are virtues beside it: all the other dishonors are chivalry itself by comparison. Poverty blights whole cities; spreads horrible pestilences; strikes dead the very souls of all who come within sight, sound or smell of it. What you call crime is nothing: a murder here and a theft there, a blow now and a curse then: what do they matter? they are only the accidents and illnesses of life: there are not fifty genuine professional criminals in London. But there are millions of poor people, abject people, dirty people, ill fed, ill clothed people. They poison us morally and physically: they kill the happiness of society: they force us to do away with our own liberties and to organize unnatural cruelties for fear they should rise against us and drag us down into their abyss. Only fools fear crime: we all fear poverty."

"Undershaft: You have made for yourself something that you call a morality or a religion or what not. It doesn't fit the facts. Well, scrap it. Scrap it and get one that does fit. That is what is wrong with the world at present. It scraps its obsolete steam engines and dynamos; but it wont scrap its old prejudices and its old moralities and its old religions and its old political constitutions. Whats the result? In machinery it does very well; but in morals and religion and politics it is working at a loss that brings it nearer bankruptcy every year."

"Shaw: Madam, would you sleep with me for a million pounds? Actress: My goodness, Well, I'd certainly think about it Shaw: Would you sleep with me for a pound? Actress: Certainly not! What kind of woman do you think I am?! Shaw: Madam, we've already established that. Now we are haggling over the price."

"[Isadora Duncan] wrote to George Bernard Shaw: "Will you be the father of my next child? A combination of my beauty and your brains would startle the world," but he replied: "I must decline your offer with thanks, for the child might have my beauty and your brains.""

"If you're going to tell people the truth, you better make them laugh; otherwise they'll kill you."

"Dancing is a perpendicular expression of a horizontal desire."

"The only time my education was interrupted was when I was in school."

"England and America are two countries divided [separated] by a common [the same] language. (attributed to Shaw despite not appearing in his writings, see Oxford Dictionary of Quotations [4th edn., p. 638, quote no. 31]. See also Esar & Bentley, 1951, Treasury of Humorous Quotations; earlier attributed to Shaw in the Reader's Digest, November 1942.)"

"Progress is impossible without change; and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything. Creeds, articles, and institutes of religious faith ossify our brains and make change impossible. As such they are nuisances, and in practice have to be mostly ignored."

"A man of my spiritual intensity does not eat corpses."

"I know I began as a passion and have ended as a habit, like all husbands."

"The epithet beautiful is used by surgeons to describe operations which their patients describe as ghastly, by physicists to describe methods of measurement which leave sentimentalists cold, by lawyers to describe cases which ruin all the parties to them, and by lovers to describe the objects of their infatuation, however unattractive they may appear to the unaffected spectators."

"Vulgarity is a necessary part of a complete author's equipment; and the clown is sometimes the best part of the circus."

"The first prison I ever saw had inscribed on it ; but as the inscription was on the outside, the prisoners could not read it."

"Consistency is the enemy of enterprise, just as symmetry is the enemy of art."

"The secret of success is to offend the greatest number of people."

"The road to ignorance is paved with good editions. Only the illiterate can afford to buy good books now."

"I am a communist, but not a member of the Communist Party. Stalin is a first rate Fabian. I am one of the founders of Fabianism and as such very friendly to Russia."

"We have no reason to suppose that we are the Creator's last word."

"A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul."

"The apparent multiplicity of Gods is bewildering at the first glance; but you presently discover that they are all the same one God in different aspects and functions and even sexes. There is always one uttermost God who defies personification. This makes Hinduism the most tolerant religion in the world, because its one transcendent God includes all possible Gods... Hinduism is so elastic and so subtle that the profoundest Methodist and the crudest idolater are equally at home in it. Islam is very different, being ferociously intolerant. What I may call Manifold Monotheism becomes in the minds of very simple folk an absurdly polytheistic idolatry, just as European peasants not only worship Saints and the Virgin as Gods, but will fight fanatically for their faith in the ugly little black doll who is the Virgin of their own Church against the black doll of the next village. When the Arabs had run this sort of idolatry to such extremes ... they did this without black dolls and worshipped any stone that looked funny, Mahomet rose up at the risk of his life and insulted the stones shockingly, declaring that there is only one God, Allah, the glorious, the great... And there was to be no nonsense about toleration. You accepted Allah or you had your throat cut by someone who did accept him, and who went to Paradise for having sent you to Hell. Mahomet was a great Protestant religious force, like George Fox or Wesley.... There is actually a great Hindu sect, the Jains, with Temples of amazing magnificence, which abolish God, not on materialist atheist considerations, but as unspeakable and unknowable, transcending all human comprehension."

"The quality of a play is the quality of its ideas."

"The sex relation is not a personal relation. It can be irresistibly desired and rapturously consummated between persons who could not endure one another for a day in any other relation."

"We ought to tackle the Jewish question by admitting the right of States to make eugenic experiments by weeding out any strains that they think undesirable, but insisting that they should do it as humanely as they can afford to, and not shock civilization by such misdemeanors as the expulsion and robbery of Einstein."

"Dear Katharine Cornell: I don't think I was ever so astonished by a picture as I was by your photograph. Your success as Candida and something blonde and expansive about your name had created an ideal British Candida in my imagination. Fancy my feelings on seeing the photograph of a gorgeous dark lady from the cradle of the human race ... wherever that was ... Ceylon ... Sumatra ... Hilo ... or the southernmost corner of the Garden of Eden. If you look like that it doesn't matter a rap if you can act or not. Can you? Yours, breath bereaved, Bernard Shaw."

"Then the first man who had the gumption to see that we might get up on our legs and defy all those old treaties, he would be the most popular man in England. There can be no peace in the world until there is peace between England, France, Germany, Russia, the United States and all the big powers of the West. Now take that home and think about it and don't be frightened any more about the Germans."

"The news from Germany is the very best news that we have had since the war. Ever since 1918 we, like all the other powers, have been behaving just as badly as we possibly could. Well now, when Germany fell, they want and they sat on Germany's head and they kept sitting on Germany's head, although it was quite preposterous, quite evident to any sensible persona, that they couldn't go on like that forever. Then there came a very intelligent gentleman named Adolf Hitler and he, knowing perfectly well that the powers would not fight, he snapped his fingers at the Treaty of Versailles. Just exactly as if we in England had been in the same position. As if the powers had beaten us and sat on our head."

"The Italians must allow us to slaughter the Momands, because, if we do not kill the warlike hillmen, they will kill us. And we must allow the Italians to slaughter the Danakils for the same reason."

"Stalin has exiled Trotsky and become the Pontifex Maximus of the new Russo-Catholic Church of Communism on two grounds. First, he is a practical Nationalist statesman recognizing that Russia is a big enough handful for mortal rulers to tackle without taking on the rest of the world as well.... Second, Stalin, inflexible as to his final aim, is a compete opportunist as to the means."

"Now take Stalin himself. He is 'neither duke nor peer', not a king, not a chancellor, not a dictator, not a Prime Minister, not an archbishop, not entitled to salutes enforced by youths in coloured shirts, but simply secretary of the supreme controlling organ of the hierarchy, subject to dismissal at five minutes' notice if he does not give satisfaction. This position he has attained through the survival of the fittest, and has held through the years of the most appalling vicissitudes that ever attended the birth pangs of a new civilisation."

"I appeal to the chemists to discover a humane gas that will kill instantly and painlessly. In short, a gentlemanly gas – deadly by all means, but humane not cruel."

"Mussolini, Kemal, Pilsudski, Hitler and the rest can all depend on me to judge them by their ability to deliver the goods and not by... comfortable notions of freedom. Stalin has delivered the goods to an extent that seemed impossible ten years ago; and I take off my hat to him accordingly."

"I have always held the religion of Muhammad in high estimation because of its wonderful vitality. It is the only religion which appears to me to possess that assimilating capability to the changing phase of existence which can make itself appeal to every age. The world must doubtless attach high value to the predictions of great men like me. I have prophesied about the faith of Muhammad that it would be acceptable to the Europe of to-morrow as it is beginning to be acceptable to the Europe of to-day. The medieval ecclesiastics either through ignorance or bigotry painted Muhammadanism in the darkest colours. They were in fact trained both to hate the man Muhammad and his religion. To them Muhammad was Anti-Christ. I have studied him — the wonderful man — and in my opinion far from being an Anti-Christ he must be called the Saviour of Humanity. 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. But to proceed, it was in the 19th century that honest thinkers like Carlyle, Goethe and Gibbon perceived intrinsic worth in the religion of Muhammad and thus there was some change for the better in the European attitude towards Islam. But the Europe of the present century is far advanced. It is beginning to be enamoured of the creed of Muhammad. In the next century it may go still further in recognising the utility of that creed in solving its problems and it is in this sense that you must understand my prediction. Already even at the present time many of my own people and of Europe as well have gone over to the faith of Muhammad, and the Islamization of Europe, to use the expression of your own query, may be said to have begun."

"As a red hot Communist I am in favour of fascism. The only drawback to Sir Oswald's movement is that it is not quite British enough."

"Until you have socialism you will never have State solidity, because, as we know, if you have private property you will immediately split your stake. You get the class conflict, the class struggle, the confrontation of interests between the proprietors and between the proletariat; and, therefore, you have something that is crumbling, that is divided against itself."

"Hitler is a very remarkable man, a very able man... What Hitler should have done was not to drive the Jews out, what he ought to have said was, 'I will tolerate the Jews to any extent on condition that no Jew marries a Jewess, on condition that he marries a German.'"