“You have set up in New York harbor a monstrous idol which you call Liberty. The only thing that remains to complete that monument is to put on its pedestal the inscription written by Dante on the gate of Hell: ‘All hope abandon, ye who enter here.'”
–George Bernard Shaw, Speech in New York City, April 11, 1933
“Democracy substitutes selection by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few.”
–George Bernard Shaw, Preface to Major Barbara
“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, Maxims for Revolutionists
English: George Bernard Shaw date between 1900-1910 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
“It is the deed that teaches, not the name we give it. Murder and capital punishment are not opposites that cancel one another, but similars that breed their kind.”
–George Bernard Shaw, Maxims for Revolutionists
English: Anglo-Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw writing in notebook at time of first production of his play “Pygmalion.” (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
“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. Whether Socrates got as much out of life as [John] Wesley [the founder of Methodism] is an unanswerable question, but a nation of Socrateses would be much safer and happier than a nation of Wesley.”
—George Bernard Shaw (quoted in The Heretic’s Handbook of Quotations)
“Alcohol is a very necessary article … It makes life bearable to millions of people who could not endure their existence if they were quite sober. It enables Parliament to do things at eleven at night that no sane person would do at eleven in the morning.”
–George Bernard Shaw, Major Barbara (“Undershaft” speaking)
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Quoted in The Heretic’s Handbook of Quotations
“All who achieve real distinction in life begin as revolutionists. The most distinguished persons become more revolutionary as they grow older, although they are commonly supposed to become more conservative owing to their loss of faith in conventional methods of reform.”
–George Bernard Shaw, The Revolutionist’s Handbook
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Quoted in The Heretic’s Handbook of Quotations
Sharp and Pointed 