All Quotes

"That proves it's not by Shaw, because all Shaw's characters are himself: mere puppets stuck up to spout Shaw."

"As long as I have a want, I have a reason for living. Satisfaction is death."

"What is life but a series of inspired follies? The difficulty is to find them to do. Never lose a chance: it doesn't come every day."

"I wouldn't have ate it, only I'm too lady-like to take it out of my mouth."

"I don't want to talk grammar, I want to talk like a lady."

"Any public committee man who tries to pack the moral cards in the interest of his own notions is guilty of corruption and impertinence. The business of a public library is not to supply the public with the books the committee thinks good for the public, but to supply the public with the books the public wants. ... Censorship ends in logical completeness when nobody is allowed to read any books except the books that nobody can read. But as the ratepayer is mostly a coward and a fool in these difficult matters, and the committee is quite sure that it can succeed where the Roman Catholic Church has made its index expurgatorius the laughing-stock of the world, censorship will rage until it reduces itself to absurdity; and even then the best books will be in danger still."

"Well, I tell you again to get rid of your Constitution. But I suppose you won't do it. You have a good president and you have a bad Constitution, and the bad Constitution gets the better of the good President all the time. The end of it will be is that you might as well have an English Prime Minister."

"Custom will reconcile people to any atrocity; and fashion will drive them to acquire any custom."

"All great truths begin as blasphemies."

"You'll never have a quiet world till you knock the patriotism out of the human race."

"It is more dangerous to be a great prophet or poet than to promote twenty companies for swindling simple folk out of their savings."

"Optimistic lies have such immense therapeutic value that a doctor who cannot tell them convincingly has mistaken his profession."

"A perpetual holiday is a good working definition of Hell."

"I like a bit of a mongrel myself, whether it's a man or a dog; they're the best for every day."

"If parents would only realize how they bore their children!"

"A nation should always be healthily rebellious; but the king or prime minister has yet to be found who will make trouble by cultivating that side of the national spirit. A child should begin to assert itself early, and shift for itself more and more not only in washing and dressing itself, but in opinions and conduct; yet as nothing is so exasperating and so unlovable as an uppish child, it is useless to expect parents and schoolmasters to inculcate this uppishness. Such unamiable precepts as Always contradict an authoritative statement, Always return a blow, Never lose a chance of a good fight, When you are scolded for a mistake ask the person who scolds you whether he or she supposes you did it on purpose, and follow the question with a blow or an insult or some other unmistakable expression of resentment, Remember that the progress of the world depends on your knowing better than your elders, are just as important as those of The Sermon on the Mount; but no one has yet seen them written up in letters of gold in a schoolroom or nursery."

"No public man in these islands ever believes that the Bible means what it says: he is always convinced that it says what he means."

"I have defined the 100 per cent American as 99 per cent an idiot."

"You are so careful of your boy's morals, knowing how troublesome they may be, that you keep him away from the Venus of Milo only to find him in the arms of the scullery maid or someone much worse. You decide that the Hermes of Praxiteles and Wagner's Tristan are not suited for young girls; and your daughter marries somebody appallingly unlike either Hermes or Tristan solely to escape from your parental protection. You have not stifled a single passion nor averted a single danger: you have depraved the passions by starving them, and broken down all the defences which so effectively protect children brought up in freedom."

"The secret of being miserable is to have leisure to bother about whether you are happy or not. The cure for it is occupation, because occupation means pre-occupation; and the pre-occupied person is neither happy nor unhappy, but simply alive and active, which is pleasanter than any happiness until you are tired of it."

"Do not try to live for ever. You will not succeed."

"No man who is occupied in doing a very difficult thing, and doing it well, ever loses his self-respect."

"Attention and activity lead to mistakes as well as to successes; but a life spent in making mistakes is not only more honorable but more useful than a life spent doing nothing."

"All professions are conspiracies against the laity."

"I don't believe in morality. I'm a disciple of Bernard Shaw."

"Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh."

"Chloroform has done a lot of mischief. It's enabled every fool to be a surgeon."

"Use your health, even to the point of wearing it out. That is what it is for. Spend all you have before you die; and do not outlive yourself."

"It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman hate or despise him."

"The English have no respect for their language, and will not teach their children to speak it."

"He ain't a copper just look at 'is boots!"

"Ah-ah-ah-ah-ow-ow-oo-oo!!! I ain't dirty: I washed me face and hands afore I come, I did!"

"I ask you, what am I? I'm one of the undeserving poor: thats what I am. Think of what that means to a man."

"I aint such a mug as to put up my children to all I know myself."

"Walk! Not bloody likely. I am going in a taxi."

"I heard your prayers Thank God it's all over!"

"You see, lots of the real people can't do it at all: they're such fools that they think style comes by nature to people in their position; and so they never learn. There's always something professional about doing a thing superlatively well."

"Time enough to think of the future when you haven't any future to think of."

"I have to live for others and not for myself; that's middle-class morality."

"Independence? That's middle-class blasphemy. We are all dependent on one another, every soul of us on earth."

"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 of happiness, and by no means a necessity of life."

"Howbeit, Paul succeeded in stealing the image of Christ crucified for the figure-head of his Salvationist vessel, with its Adam posing as the natural man, its doctrine of original sin, and its damnation avoidable only by faith in the sacrifice of the cross. In fact, no sooner had Jesus knocked over the dragon of superstition than Paul boldly set it on its legs again in the name of Jesus."

"He [the British taxpayer] must be taught that war is not precise or economical. It is almost inconceivably wasteful and extravagant. It burns the house to roast the pig, and even then seldom roasts him effectively..... waste is the law of modern war; and nothing is cheap on the battlefield except the lives of men...... Therefore, my taxpayer, resign yourself to this: that we may fight bravely, fight hard, fight long, fight cunningly, fight recklessly, fight in a hundred and fifty ways, but we cannot fight cheaply."

"He must be greatly changed. Has he attained the seventh degree of concentration?"

"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."

"When your heart is broken, your boats are burned: nothing matters any more. It is the end of happiness and the beginning of peace."

"Impression of Gandhi! You might as well ask one to give his impression of the Himalayas."

"The moment we face it frankly we are driven to the conclusion that the community has a right to put a price on the right to live in it ... If people are fit to live, let them live under decent human conditions. If they are not fit to live, kill them in a decent human way. Is it any wonder that some of us are driven to prescribe the lethal chamber as the solution for the hard cases which are at present made the excuse for dragging all the other cases down to their level, and the only solution that will create a sense of full social responsibility in modern populations?"

"The Nazi movement is in many respects one which has my warmest sympathy."

"Some of the things Mussolini has done, and some that he is threatening to do go further in the direction of Socialism than the English Labour Party could yet venture if they were in power."