Quotes

It is the highest impertinence and presumption, therefore, in kings and ministers, to pretend to watch over the economy of private people, and to restrain their expence either by sumptuary laws, or by prohibiting the importation of foreign luxuries. They are themselves always, and without any exception, the greatest spendthrifts in the society. Let them look well after their own expence, and they may safely trust private people with theirs. If their own extravagance does not ruin the state, that of their subjects never will.

[ On looking at an expensive shop :] How many things I can do without!

The rich . . . divide with the poor the produce of all their improvements. They are led by an invisible hand to make nearly the same distribution of the necessaries of life, which would have been made, had the earth been divided into equal proportions among all its inhabitants.

With the greater part of rich people, the chief enjoyment of riches consists in the parade of riches, which in their eyes is never so complete as when they appear to possess those decisive marks of opulence which nobody can possess but themselves.

[ Of Richard Porson :] There were moments when his memory failed him; and he would forget to eat dinner, though he never forgot a quotation.

A lady asked me why, on most occasions, I wore black.

Buildings will collapse, power plants will stop generating electricity. Generals will drop atomic bombs on their own populations. Mad revolutionaries will run in the streets, crying fantastic slogans. I have often thought it would begin in New York. This metropolis has all the symptoms of a mind gone berserk.

Jane, Jane,

The One remains, the many change and pass;

The greater philosopher a man is, the more difficult it is for him to answer the foolish questions of common people.

Near them, on the sand,

And on the pedestal these words appear:

England and America are two countries

I met a traveller from an antique land Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert.

[ Of Archibald Primrose, Fifth Earl of Rosebery :] [A] man who never missed a chance of missing an opportunity.

[ When Isadora Duncan regretted that they could not have a child together, saying, “Think what a child it would be, with my body and your brain” :] I know, but suppose the child was so unlucky as to have my body and your brain?

[ Referring to film producer Samuel Goldwyn :] Well, Mr. Goldwyn, there is not much use in going on. There is this difference between you and me: You are only interested in art and I am only interested in money.

We speak of war gods, but not of mathematician gods, poet or painter gods, or inventor gods. Nobody has ever called me a god; I am at best a sage. We worship all the conquerors, but have only one Prince of Peace, who was horribly put to death, and if he lived in these islands, would have some difficulty in getting exempted from military service as a conscientious objector.

[ Henry Higgins, played by Leslie Howard, speaking :] Where the devil are my slippers, Eliza?

In Hampshire, Hereford, and Hertford, Hurricanes hardly ever happen.

If you don’t begin to be a revolutionist at the age of twenty, then at fifty you will be a most impossible old fossil. If you are a red revolutionary at the age of twenty, you have some chance of being up-to-date when you are forty!

Democracy, then, cannot be government by the people: it can only be government by consent of the governed. Unfortunately, when democratic statesmen propose to govern us by our own consent, they find that we don’t want to be governed at all, and that we regard rates and taxes and rents and death duties as intolerable burdens. What we want to know is how little government we can get along with without being murdered in our beds.

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

I am the sort of man who devotes his life to the salvation of humanity in the abstract, and can’t bear to give a penny to a starving widow.

[ Referring to World War I :] When all the world goes mad, one must accept madness as sanity, since sanity is, in the last analysis, nothing but the madness on which the whole world happens to agree.

We all profess the deepest regard for liberty; but no sooner does anyone claim to exercise it than we declare with horror that we are in favor of liberty but not of licence, and demand indignantly whether true freedom can ever mean freedom to do wrong, to preach sedition and immorality, to utter blasphemy. Yet this is exactly what liberty does mean.

I’ve got a soul: don’t tell me I haven’t. Cut me up and you can’t find it. Cut up a steam engine and you can’t find the steam. But, by George, it makes the engine go.

Anybody on for a game of tennis?

I have not wasted my life trifling with literary fools in taverns as [Samuel] Johnson did when he should have been shaking England with the thunder of his spirit.

If you demand my authorities for this and that, I must reply that only those who have never hunted up the authorities as I have believe that there is any authority who is not contradicted flatly by some other authority.

The early Christian rules of life were not made to last, because the early Christians did not believe that the world itself was going to last.

It’s usually pointed out that women are not fit for political power, and ought not to be trusted with a vote because they are politically ignorant, socially prejudiced, narrow-minded, and selfish. True enough, but precisely the same is true of men!

Man and Superman.

On Christmas Day it is proclaimed that Christianity established peace on earth and good will towards men. Next day the Christian, with refreshed soul, goes back to the manufacture of submarines and torpedoes.

I . . . once read the Old Testament and the four Gospels straight through, from a vainglorious desire to do what nobody else had done.

With the single exception of Homer, there is no eminent writer, not even Sir Walter Scott, whom I can despise so entirely as I despise Shakespeare when I measure my mind against his.

Patriotism is, fundamentally, a conviction that a particular country is the best in the world because you were born in it.

I dread success. To have succeeded is to have finished one’s business on earth, like the male spider, who is killed by the female the moment he has succeeded in his courtship. I like a state of continual becoming, with a goal in front and not behind.

We do not seek for truth in the abstract. . . .

The man of business . . . goes on Sunday to the church with the regularity of the village blacksmith, there to renounce and abjure before his God the line of conduct which he intends to pursue with all his might during the following week.

The Family is a petty despotism; . . . a school in which men learn to despise women and women to mistrust men (much more than is necessary); a slaughterhouse for children (the firstborn succumbing to unskilled treatment, the lastborn to neglect). . . . Unfortunately, we cannot as yet do without it; and therefore we put a good face on the matter by conferring upon it the conventional attribute of sacredness, and impudently proclaiming it the source of all the virtues it has well-nigh killed in us.

[ Question asked by Shaw to presidential candidate Michael Dukakis regarding his wife :] Governor, if Kitty Dukakis were raped and murdered, would you favor an irrevocable death penalty for the killer?

But this invites the occult mind,

Backwardly tolerant, Faustus was expelled

California love!

Our throats were tight as tourniquets.

O Julius Caesar, thou art mighty yet.

I tell you that which you yourselves do know,