George Bernard Shaw Book Quotations

How can you dare teach a man to read until you've taught him everything else first?

Censorship ends in logical completeness when nobody is allowed to read any books except the books that nobody reads.

I often quote myself. It adds spice to my conversation.

Obscenity can be found in every book except the telephone directory.

For the pre-Darwinian age had come to be regarded as a Dark Age in which men still believed that the book of Genesis was a standard scientific treatise, and that the only additions to it were Galileo'a demonstration of Leonardo da Vinci's simple remark that the earth is a moon of the sun, Sir Humphrey Davy's invention of the safety lamp, the discovery of electricity, the application of steam to industrial purposes, and the penny post.

People get nothing out of books but what they bring to them.

I don't know what to say about this book. The experience on which it is founded is so extraordinary, that an honest record of it should be preserved . . . But it would have driven me mad; and I am not sure that the author came out of it without a slight derangement.

Two people getting together to write a book is like three people getting together to have a baby. One of them is superfluous.

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

You may well ask me why...I took the time to write [books]. I can only reply that I do not know. There was no why about it. I had to: that was all.

A book is like a child: it is easier to bring it into the world than to control it when it is launched there.

Captain Shotover: How much does your soul eat? Ellie: Oh, a lot. It eats music and pictures and books and mountains and lakes and beautiful things to wear and nice people to be with.

While browsing in a second-hand bookshop one day, George Bernard Shaw was amused to find a copy of one of his own works which he himself had inscribed for a friend: "To ----, with esteem, George Bernard Shaw." He immediately purchased the book and returned it to the friend with a second inscription: "With renewed esteem, George Bernard Shaw.

For nearly twenty years I have been a published author... But I have never yet seen a book of mine offered for sale in a shop window.

The fact is that the intrinsic worth of the book, play or whatever the author is trying to sell is the least, last factor in the the whole transaction.

I lay my eternal curse on whomsoever shall now or at any time hereafter make schoolbooks of my works and make me hated as Shakespeare is hated. My plays were not designed as instruments of torture. All the schools that lust after them get this answer, and will never get any other.

The lesson intended by an author is hardly ever the lesson the world chooses to learn from his book.

There is nothing on earth more exquisite than a bonny book, with well-placed columns of rich black writing in beautiful borders, and illuminated pictures cunningly inset. But nowadays, instead of looking at books, people read them. A book might as well be one of those orders for bacon and bran.

Keep away from books and from men who get their ideas from books, and your own books will always be fresh.

I finished my first book seventy-six years ago. I offered it to every publisher on the English-speaking earth I had ever heard of. Their refusals were unanimous: and it did not get into print until, fifty years later; publishers would publish anything that had my name on it.

There is, on the whole, nothing on earth intended for innocent people so horrible as a school. To begin with, it is a prison. But in some respects more cruel than a prison. In a prison, for instance, you are not forced to read books written by the warders and the governor. . . .In the prison you are not forced to sit listening to turnkeys discoursing without charm or interest on subjects that they don't understand and don't care about, and therefore incapable of making you understand or care about. In a prison they may torture your body; but they do not torture your brains.

Make it a rule never to give a child a book you would not read yourself.

Only in books has mankind known perfect truth, love and beauty.