George Bernard Shaw, born on July 26, 1856, in Dublin, Ireland, was a renowned playwright, critic, and public speaker. With his sharp wit, biting satire, and progressive views, Shaw challenged societal norms and advocated for social justice and equality. His plays, essays, and speeches continue to inspire and provoke thought, cementing his place as one of the greatest literary figures of the 20th century.
Shaw’s early life was marked by financial struggles, but his voracious appetite for reading and self-education fueled his intellectual growth. He began his career as a critic and journalist, writing reviews and essays that showcased his incisive wit and insights. Shaw’s early experiences in the theater industry would later influence his playwriting style and unique approach to drama.
Shaw’s plays challenged conventional theatrical traditions, embracing a new form of drama that blended comedy, social commentary, and philosophical ideas. His most famous works, including “Pygmalion” and “Major Barbara,” tackled issues of class, gender, and morality with a combination of humor and thought-provoking dialogue. Shaw used the stage as a platform to confront societal hypocrisies and advocate for progressive change.
Shaw’s wit and intellectual acuity were evident not only in his plays but also in his speeches and public engagements. He fearlessly tackled topics such as socialism, women’s rights, and the hypocrisy of the ruling classes. Shaw’s eloquent and persuasive oratory challenged listeners to question established norms and consider alternative perspectives.
George Bernard Shaw’s contributions to literature and theater earned him numerous accolades, including the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1925. His plays continue to be performed worldwide and have had a lasting impact on the theatrical landscape. Shaw’s use of humor and satire to address serious social issues influenced subsequent generations of playwrights, and his ideas on socialism and human rights still resonate with those advocating for social justice.
Beyond his literary achievements, Shaw’s personal life and public persona were equally intriguing. He was known for his unconventional lifestyle, sharp-tongued wit, and lifelong commitment to vegetarianism. Shaw’s beliefs and actions reflected his commitment to challenging societal norms and living according to his own principles.
George Bernard Shaw’s legacy as a playwright, critic, and social commentator endures, with his works continuing to inspire and challenge audiences. His use of humor, sharp dialogue, and thought-provoking themes shed light on societal injustices and the complexities of human nature. Shaw’s unwavering commitment to questioning authority, challenging convention, and advocating for social change ensures his place among the literary greats. As we reflect on Shaw’s contributions, we are reminded of the power of art to provoke thought, challenge assumptions, and inspire positive transformation in society.
It is difficult, if not impossible, for most people to think otherwise than in the fashion of their own period.
George Bernard Shaw
In literature the ambition of the novice is to acquire the literary language: the struggle of the adept is to get rid of it.
George Bernard Shaw
There are two tragedies in life. One is not to get your heart’s desire. The other is to get it.
George Bernard Shaw
When a stupid man is doing something he is ashamed of, he always declares that it is his duty.
George Bernard Shaw
Life is no brief candle to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got a hold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.
George Bernard Shaw
Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh.
George Bernard Shaw
In the arts of life man invents nothing; but in the arts of death he outdoes Nature herself, and produces by chemistry and machinery all the slaughter of plague, pestilence, and famine.
George Bernard Shaw
Life is not meant to be easy, my child; but take courage -it can be delightful.
George Bernard Shaw
He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches.
George Bernard Shaw
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
George Bernard Shaw
Power does not corrupt men; fools, however, if they get into a position of power, corrupt power.
George Bernard Shaw
We don’t stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing.
George Bernard Shaw
Do not try to live forever. You will not succeed.
George Bernard Shaw
You can easily find people who are ten times as rich at sixty as they were at twenty; but not one of them will tell you that they are ten times as happy.
George Bernard Shaw
The only service a friend can really render is to keep up your courage by holding up to you a mirror in which you can see a noble image of yourself.
George Bernard Shaw
Life is no brief candle to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got a hold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.
George Bernard Shaw
Democracy is a form of government that substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few.
George Bernard Shaw
Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.
George Bernard Shaw
Only on paper has humanity yet achieved glory, beauty, truth, knowledge, virtue, and abiding love.
George Bernard Shaw
Science is always wrong, it never solves a problem without creating ten more.
George Bernard Shaw
As long as I have a want, I have a reason for living. Satisfaction is death.
George Bernard Shaw
Youth, which is forgiven everything, forgives itself nothing: age, which forgives itself everything, is forgiven nothing.
George Bernard Shaw
A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.
George Bernard Shaw
Marriage is popular because it combines the maximum of temptation with the maximum of opportunity.
George Bernard Shaw
Miracles, in the sense of phenomena we cannot explain, surround us on every hand: life itself is the miracle of miracles.
George Bernard Shaw
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.
George Bernard Shaw
We have no more right to consume happiness without producing it than to consume wealth without producing it.
George Bernard Shaw
The greatest evils and the worst of crimes is poverty; our first duty, a duty to which every other consideration should be sacrificed, is not to be poor.
George Bernard Shaw
Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.
George Bernard Shaw
We are made wise not by the recollection of our past, but by the responsibility for our future.
George Bernard Shaw
If you must hold yourself up to your children as an object lesson, hold yourself up as a warning and not as an example.
George Bernard Shaw
Make it a rule never to give a child a book you would not read yourself.
George Bernard Shaw
Those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.
George Bernard Shaw
An asylum for the sane would be empty in America.
George Bernard Shaw
People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don’t believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and if they can’t find them, make them.
George Bernard Shaw
It is not disbelief that is dangerous to our society; it is belief
George Bernard Shaw
You see things; you say, ‘Why?’ But I dream things that never were; and I say ‘Why not?’
George Bernard Shaw
Go anywhere in England where there are natural, wholesome, contented, and really nice English people; and what do you always find? That the stables are the real center of the household.
George Bernard Shaw
The secret of being miserable is to have leisure to bother about whether you are happy or not. The cure for it is occupation.
George Bernard Shaw
The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.
George Bernard Shaw
Beware of false knowledge; it is more dangerous than ignorance.
George Bernard Shaw
What we want is to see the child in pursuit of knowledge, and not knowledge in pursuit of the child.
George Bernard Shaw
The longer I live, the more I see that I am never wrong about anything, and that all the pains I have so humbly taken to verify my notions have only wasted my time.
George Bernard Shaw
The true artist will let his wife starve, his children go barefoot, his mother drudge for a living at seventy, sooner than work at anything but his art.
George Bernard Shaw
The secret to success is to offend the greatest number of people.
George Bernard Shaw
Men are not governed by justice, but by law or persuasion. When they refuse to be governed by law or persuasion, they have to be governed by force or fraud, or both.
George Bernard Shaw
I have to live for others and not for myself; that’s middle class morality.
George Bernard Shaw
Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it.
George Bernard Shaw
The minority is sometimes right; the majority always wrong.
George Bernard Shaw
A love affair should always be a honeymoon. And the only way to make sure of that is to keep changing the man; for the same man can never keep it up.
George Bernard Shaw
The whole strength of England lies in the fact that the enormous majority of the English people are snobs.
George Bernard Shaw
The art of government is the organization of idolatry. The bureaucracy consists of functionaries; the aristocracy, of idols; the democracy, of idolaters. The populace cannot understand the bureaucracy: it can only worship the national idols.
George Bernard Shaw
You must not suppose, because I am a man of letters, that I never tried to earn an honest living.
George Bernard Shaw
Patriotism is a pernicious, psychopathic form of idiocy.
George Bernard Shaw
The American Constitution, one of the few modern political documents drawn up by men who were forced by the sternest circumstances to think out what they really had to face, instead of chopping logic in a university classroom.
George Bernard Shaw
The government who robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.
George Bernard Shaw
Why, except as a means of livelihood, a man should desire to act on the stage when he has the whole world to act in, is not clear to me.
George Bernard Shaw
All progress is initiated by challenging current conceptions, and executed by supplanting existing institutions.
George Bernard Shaw
What we call education and culture is for the most part nothing but the substitution of reading for experience, of literature for life, of the obsolete fictitious for the contemporary real.
George Bernard Shaw
My way of joking is telling the truth; that is the funniest joke in the world.
George Bernard Shaw
A broken heart is a very pleasant complaint for a man in London if he has a comfortable income.
George Bernard Shaw
Parentage is a very important profession, but no test of fitness for it is ever imposed in the interest of the children.
George Bernard Shaw
Chess is a foolish expedient for making idle people believe they are doing something very clever when they are only wasting their time.
George Bernard Shaw
We must make the world honest before we can honestly say to our children that honesty is the best policy.
George Bernard Shaw
A man’s interest in the world is only the overflow of his interest in himself.
George Bernard Shaw
Human beings are the only animals of which I am thoroughly and cravenly afraid.
George Bernard Shaw
Censorship ends in logical completeness when nobody is allowed to read any books except the books nobody reads.
George Bernard Shaw
The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them; that’s the essence of inhumanity.
George Bernard Shaw
If you can’t get rid of the skeleton in your closet, you’d best teach it to dance.
George Bernard Shaw
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.
George Bernard Shaw
The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and all time.
George Bernard Shaw
This creative man, who in his own selfish affairs is a coward to the backbone, will fight for an idea like a hero.
George Bernard Shaw
Englishmen hate Liberty and Equality too much to understand them. But every Englishman loves a pedigree.
George Bernard Shaw
I often quote myself. It adds spice to my conversation.
George Bernard Shaw
The only man who behaves sensibly is my tailor; he takes my measurements anew every time he sees me, while all the rest go on with their old measurements and expect me to fit them.
George Bernard Shaw
The English are not very spiritual people, so they invented cricket to give them some idea of eternity.
George Bernard Shaw
Every person who has mastered a profession is a skeptic concerning it.
George Bernard Shaw
All great truths begin as blasphemies.
George Bernard Shaw
Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine and at last you create what you will.
George Bernard Shaw
I showed my appreciation of my native land in the usual Irish way: by getting out of it as soon as I possibly could.
George Bernard Shaw
Build a system that even a fool can use, and only a fool will want to use.
George Bernard Shaw
We learn from experience that men never learn anything from experience.
George Bernard Shaw
Though all society is founded on intolerance, all improvement is founded on tolerance.
George Bernard Shaw
A perpetual holiday is a good working definition of hell.
George Bernard Shaw
A gentleman is one who puts more into the world than he takes out.
George Bernard Shaw
People become attached to their burdens sometimes more than the burdens are attached to them.
George Bernard Shaw
Money is indeed the most important thing in the world; and all sound and successful personal and national morality should have this fact for its basis.
George Bernard Shaw
Man is the only animal which esteems itself rich in proportion to the number and voracity of its parasites.
George Bernard Shaw
In literature the ambition of the novice is to acquire the literary language: the struggle of the adept is to get rid of it.
George Bernard Shaw
He knows nothing; he thinks he knows everything – that clearly points to a political career.
George Bernard Shaw
Statistics show that of those who contract the habit of eating, very few survive.
George Bernard Shaw
Be like the sun and meadow, which are not in the least concerned about the coming winter.
George Bernard Shaw
Two percent of the people think; three percent of the people think they think; and ninety-five percent of the people would rather die than think.
George Bernard Shaw
My reputation grows with every failure.
George Bernard Shaw
The English have no respect for their language, and will not teach their children to speak it.
George Bernard Shaw
Reminiscences make one feel so deliciously aged and sad.
George Bernard Shaw
Revolutions have never lightened the burden of tyranny: they have only shifted it to another shoulder.
George Bernard Shaw
We live in an atmosphere of shame. We are ashamed of everything that is real about us; ashamed of ourselves, of our relatives, of our incomes, of our accents, of our opinions, of our experience, just as we are ashamed of our naked skins.
George Bernard Shaw
I never thought much of the courage of a lion tamer. Inside the cage he is at least safe from people.
George Bernard Shaw
It is dangerous to be sincere unless you are also stupid.
George Bernard Shaw
A man of great common sense and good taste – meaning thereby a man without originality or moral courage.
George Bernard Shaw
Nothing makes a man so selfish as work.
George Bernard Shaw
Better keep yourself clean and bright. You are the window through which you must see the world.
George Bernard Shaw
Success does not consist in never making mistakes but in never making the same one a second time.
George Bernard Shaw
All the sweetness of religion is conveyed to the world by the hands of storytellers and imagemakers. 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.
George Bernard Shaw
If you leave the smallest corner of your head vacant for a moment, other people’s opinions will rush in from all quarters.
George Bernard Shaw
Science becomes dangerous only when it imagines that it has reached its goal.
George Bernard Shaw
Youth is a wonderful thing. What a crime to waste it on children.
George Bernard Shaw
