George Bernard Shaw Men Quotations

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

What a man believes may be ascertained, not from his creed, but from the assumptions on which he habitually acts.

The man with a toothache thinks everyone happy whose teeth are sound. The poverty-stricken man makes the same mistake about the rich man.

A broken heart is a very pleasant complaint for a man in London if he has a comfortable income.

Hegel was right when he said that we learn from history that man can never learn anything from history.

When a man wants to murder a tiger he calls it sport; when a tiger wants to murder him he calls it ferocity.

One man that has a mind and knows it can always beat ten men who haven't and don't.

Power does not corrupt men; fools, however, if they get into a position of power, corrupt power.

When a man says money can do anything, that settles it: he hasn't got any.

Beware of the man who does not return your blow: he neither forgives you nor allows you to forgive yourself.

Old men are dangerous: it doesn't matter to them what is going to happen to the world.

Until the men of action clear out the talkers we who have social consciences are at the mercy of those who have none.

A man never tells you anything until you contradict him.

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.

Choose silence of all virtues, for by it you hear other men's imperfections, and conceal your own.

It's easier to replace a dead man than a good picture.

Man can climb to the highest summits, but he cannot dwell there long.

Nothing is ever done in this world until men are prepared to kill one another if it is not done.

There is no satisfaction in hanging a man who does not object to it.

Life levels all men. Death reveals the eminent.

The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and about all time.

A man who has no office to go, to I don't care who he is, is a trial of which you can have no conception.

If I were a woman, I'd simply refuse to speak to any man or do anything for men until I'd got the vote.

Man is the only animal of which I am thoroughly and cravenly afraid of.

Leisure may be defined as free activity, labor as compulsory activity. Leisure does what it likes, labor does what it must, the compulsion being that of Nature, which in these latitudes leaves men no choice between labor and starvation.

Old men are dangerous it doesn't matter to them what is going to happen to the world

Some men see things as they are and say, ''Why?'' I of dream things that never were, and say, ''Why not?''

Some men see things as they are and ask why. Others dream things that never were and ask why not.

Well, dearie, men have to do some awfully mean things to keep up their respectability. But you can't blame them for that, can you?

We need men who can dream of things that never were, and ask why not.

Rich men without convictions are more dangerous in modern society than poor women without chastity.

All young women begin by believing they can change and reform the men they marry. They can't.

What is wrong with the prosaic Englishman is what is wrong with the prosaic men of all countries: stupidity.

Man is the only animal which esteems itself rich in proportion to the number and voracity of its parasites.

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.

I talk democracy to these men and women. I tell them that they have the vote, and that theirs is the kingdom and the power and the glory. I say to them You are supreme: exercise your power. They say, That's right: tell us what to do; and I tell them. I say Exercise our vote intelligently by voting for me. And they do. That's democracy; and a splendid thing it is too for putting the right men in the right place.

When it comes to the point, really bad men are just as rare as really good ones.

The Jews generally give value. They make you pay; but they deliver the goods. In my experience the men who want something for nothing are invariably Christians.

The only way for a woman to provide for herself decently is for her to be good to some man that can afford to be good to her.

When God created man and woman, he did not take a patent. That's why any imbecile has been able to do so ever since.

In the arts of life main 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. ... There is nothing in Man's industrial machinery but his greed and sloth: his heart is in his weapons.

Life is a disease; and the only difference between on man and another is the stage of the disease at which he lives.

What really flatters a man is that you think him worth flattering.

The worst cliques are those which consist of one man.

What a man is depends on his character; but what he does, and what we think of what he does, depends on his circumstances.

I believe that if a man like him were to assume the dictatorship of the modern world he would succeed in solving its problems in a way that would bring it the much needed peace and happiness: I have prophesied about the faith of Muhammad that it would be acceptable to the Europe of tomorrow as it is beginning to be acceptable to the Europe of today.

Leisure may be defined as free activity, labor as compulsory activity. Leisure does what it likes, labor does what it must, the compulsion being that of Nature, which in these latitudes leaves men no choice between labor and starvation.

It is a noteworthy fact that kicking and beating have played so considerable a part in the habits which necessity has imposed on mankind in past ages that the only way of preventing civilized men from beating and kicking their wives is to organize games in which they can kick and beat balls.

Men trifle with their business and their politics but never trifle with their games. It brings truth home to them. They cannot pretend they have won when they have lost nor that they had a magnificent drive when they foozled it. The Englishman is at his best on the links and at his worst in the Cabinet.

A day's work is a day's work, neither more nor less, and the man or woman who does it needs a day's sustenance, a night's repose and due leisure, whether they be painter or ploughman.

Nothing makes a man so selfish as work.

A man of great common sense and good taste - meaning thereby a man without originality or moral courage.

I'm one of the undeserving poor: that's what I am. Think of what that means to a man. It means that he's up agen middle class morality all the time.... What is middle class morality? Just an excuse for never giving me anything.

A man who desires to get married should know everything or nothing.

No man fully capable of his own language ever masters another.

You can lose a man like that by your own death, but not by his.

The body was the slave of the vortex; but the slave has become the master; and we must free ourselves from that tyranny. It is this stuff [ indicating her body ], this flesh and blood and bone and all the rest of it, that is intolerable. Even prehistoric man dreamed of what he called an astral body, and asked who would deliver him from the body of this death.

In the arts of peace Man is a bungler.

I am very subtle; but Man is deeper in his thought than I am. The woman knows that there is no such thing as nothing: the man knows that there is no such day as tomorrow. I do well to worship them.

A critic recently described me, with deadly acuteness, as having 'a kindly dislike of my fellow-creatures.' Perhaps dread would have been nearer the mark than dislike; for man is the only animal of which I am thoroughly and cravenly afraid.

A man's behaviour may be quite harmless and even beneficial, when he ismorally behaving like a scoundrel. And he may do great harm when he is morally acting on the highest principles.

Plato long ago pointed out the importance of being governed by men with sufficient sense of responsibility and comprehension of public duties to be very reluctant to undertake the work of governing.

Women are not angels. They are as foolish as men in many ways; but they have had to devote themselves to life whilst men have had to devote themselves to death; and that makes a vital difference in male and female religion. Women have been forced to fear whilst men have been forced to dare: the heroism of a woman is to nurse and protect life, and of a man to destroy it and court death.

Have you no morals, man?' 'Can't afford them,Governor.

Any sort of plain speaking is better than the nauseous sham good fellowship our democratic public men get up for shop use.

Have you ever met a man of good character where women are concerned?

In a stupid nation the man of genius becomes a god : everybody worships him and nobody does his will.

It is quite useless to declare that all men are born free if you deny that they are born good . Guarantee a man's goodness and his liberty will take care of itself. To guarantee his freedom on condition that you approve of his moral character is formally to abolish all freedom whatsoever, as every man's liberty is at the mercy of a moral indictment which any fool can trump up against everyone who violates custom, whether as a prophet or as a rascal.

In truth , mankind cannot be saved from without, by schoolmasters or any other sort of masters: it can only be lamed and enslaved by them. It is said that if you wash a cat it will never again wash itself. This may or may not be true : what is certain is that if you teach a man anything he will never learn it; and if you cure him of a disease he will be unable to cure himself the next time it attacks him.

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.

The salvation of the world depends on the men who will not take evil good-humouredly, and whose laughter destroys the fool instead of encouraging him.

The censorship method ... is that of handing the job over to some frail and erring mortal man, and making him omnipotent on the assumption that his official status will make him infallible and omniscient.

The surest way to ruin a man who doesn't know how to handle money is to give him some.

The one point on which all women are in furious secret rebellion against the existing law is the saddling of the right to a child with the obligation to become the servant of a man.

Nobody can say a word against Greek: it stamps a man at once as an educated gentlemen.

The conversion of Paul was no conversion at all; it was Paul who converted the religion that has raised one man above sin and death.

Of all human struggles there is none so treacherous and remorseless as the struggle between the artist man and the mother woman.

What is really important in Man is the part of him that we do not understand. Of much of it we are not even conscious, just as we are not normally conscious of keeping up our circulation by our heart-pump, though if we neglect it we die.

I prefer the man who calls his nonsense a mystery to him who who pretends it is a weighed, measured, analyzed fact.

The educated man is a greater nuisance than the uneducated one.

Get married, but never to a man who is home all day.

A man is like a phonograph with half-a-dozen records. You soon get tired of them all; and yet you have to sit at table whilst he reels them off to every new visitor.

Life is too short for men to take it seriously.

There are no perfectly honorable men; but every true man has one main point of honor and a few minor ones.

I occasionally swank a little because people like it; a modest man is such a nuisance.

There is in man a specific lust for cruelty which infects even his passion of pity and makes it savage.

The business man - the man to whom age brings golf instead of wisdom.

What man really wishes to do he will find a means of doing.

A man's interest in the world is only an overflow from his interest in himself.

The doctor learns that if he gets ahead of the superstitions of his patients he is a ruined man; and the result is that he instinctively takes care not to get ahead of them.

When a man teaches something he does not know to somebody else who has no aptitude for it, and gives him a certificate of proficiency, the latter has completed the education of a gentleman.

When the military man approaches, the world locks up its spoons and packs off its womankind.

A drama critic is a man who leaves no turn unstoned.

A moderately honest man with a moderately faithful wife, moderate drinkers both, in a moderately healthy house: that is the true middle class unit.

The savage bows down to idols of wood and stone, the civilized man to idols of flesh and blood

A man's own self is the last person to believe in him, and is harder to cheat than the rest of the world.

I can't talk religion to a man with bodily hunger in his eyes.

Religion is a great force - the only real motive force in the world; but what you fellows don't understand is that you must get at a man through his own religion and not through yours.

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.

Democracy is a word all public men use and none understand.