41 George Bernard Shaw Quotes on Society

George Bernard Shaw quotes on society

3. We have no more right to consume happiness without producing it than to consume wealth without producing it.

5. We don't bother much about dress and manners in England, because as a nation we don't dress well and we've no manners.

12. The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them: that's the essence of inhumanity.

21. All great truths begin as blasphemies.

22. You'll never have a quiet world till you knock the patriotism out of the human race.

32. An American has no sense of privacy. He does not know what it means. There is no such thing in the country.

39. There are no secrets better kept than the secrets everybody guesses.

50. 'Perhaps woman's art is of woman's life a thing apart, 'tis man's whole existence; just as love is said to be the reverse - though it isn't.'

70. If we were reasoning, farsighted people, four fifths of us would go straight to the Guardians for relief, and knock the whole social system to pieces with most beneficial reconstructive results. The reason we do not do this is because we work like bees or ants, by instinct or habit, not reasoning about the matter at all. Therefore when a man comes along who can and does reason, and who, applying the Kantian test to his conduct, can truly say to us, If everybody did as I do, the world would be compelled to reform itself industrially, and abolish slavery and squalor, which exist only because everybody does as you do, let us honor that man and seriously consider the advisability of following his example.

72. Abnormal professions attract two classes: those who are not good enough for ordinary bourgeois life and those who are too good for it. We are dregs and scum, sir: the dregs very filthy, the scum very superior.

77. ... for Englishmen never will be slaves: they are free to do whatever the Government and public opinion allows them to do.

88. Man gives every reason for his conduct save one, every excuse for his crimes save one, every plea for his safety save one; and that one is his cowardice. Yet all his civilization is founded on his cowardice, on his abject tameness, which he calls his respectability. There are limits to what a mule or an ass will stand; but Man will suffer himself to be degraded until his vileness becomes so loathsome to his oppressors that they themselves are forced to reform it.

89. Man, who in his own selfish affairs is a coward to the backbone, will fight for an idea like a hero. He may be abject as a citizen; but he is dangerous as a fanatic. He can only be enslaved whilst he is spiritually weak enough to listen to reason.

91. The confusion of marriage with morality has done more to destroy the conscience of the human race than any other single error.

92. Those who talk most about the blessings of marriage and the constancy of its vows are the very people who declare that if the chain were broken and the prisoners left free to choose, the whole social fabric would fly asunder. You cannot have the argument both ways. If the prisoner is happy, why lock him in? If he is not, why pretend that he is?

94. Your friends are all the dullest dogs I know. They are not beautiful: they are only decorated. They are not clean: they are only shaved and starched. They are not dignified: they are only fashionably dressed. They are not educated they are only college passmen. They are not religious: they are only pewrenters. They are not moral: they are only conventional. They are not virtuous: they are only cowardly. They are not even vicious: they are only 'frail.' They are not artistic: they are only lascivious. They are not prosperous: they are only rich. They are not loyal, they are only servile; not dutiful, only sheepish; not public spirited, only patriotic; not courageous, only quarrelsome; not determined, only obstinate; not masterful, only domineering; not self-controlled, only obtuse; not self-respecting, only vain; not kind, only sentimental; not social, only gregarious; not considerate, only polite; not intelligent, only opinionated; not progressive, only factious; not imaginative, only superstitious; not just, only vindictive; not generous, only propitiatory; not disciplined, only cowed; and not truthful at all--liars every one of them, to the very backbone of their souls.

101. As to your Life Force, which you think irresistible, it is the most resistible thing in the world for a person of any character. But if you are naturally vulgar and credulous, as all reformers are, it will thrust you first into religion, where you will sprinkle water on babies to save their souls from me; then it will drive you from religion into science, where you will snatch the babies from the water sprinkling and inoculate them with disease to save them from catching it accidentally; then you will take to politics, where you will become the catspaw of corrupt functionaries and the henchman of ambitious humbugs; and the end will be despair and decrepitude, broken nerve and shattered hopes, vain regrets for that worst and silliest of wastes and sacrifices, the waste and sacrifice of the power of enjoyment: in a word, the punishment of the fool who pursues the better before he has secured the good.

105. [between his teeth] Goon. Talk politics, you idiots: nothing sounds more respectable. Keep it up, I tell you.

108. What is virtue but the Trade Unionism of the married?

118. Lack of money is the root of all evil.

131. Whilst we have prisons it matters little which of us occupy the cells.

135. The faults of the burglar are the qualities of the financier: the manners and habits of a duke would cost a city clerk his situation.

136. ...society, with all its prisons and bayonets and whips and ostracisms and starvations, is powerless in the face of the Anarchist who is prepared to sacrifice his own life in the battle with it. Our natural safety from the cheap and devastating explosives which every Russian student can make. . .lies in the fact that brave and resolute men, when they are rascals, will not risk their skins for the good of humanity, and, when they are sympathetic enough to care for humanity, abhor murder, and never commit it until their consciences are outraged beyond endurance. The remedy is, then, simply not to outrage their consciences.

140. Cusins: Call you poverty a crime? Undershaft: The worst of crimes. All the other crimes are virtues beside it: all the other dishonors are chivalry itself by comparison. Poverty blights whole cities; spreads horrible pestilences; strikes dead the very souls of all who come within sight, sound or smell of it. What you call crime is nothing: a murder here and a theft there, a blow now and a curse then: what do they matter? they are only the accidents and illnesses of life: there are not fifty genuine professional criminals in London. But there are millions of poor people, abject people, dirty people, ill fed, ill clothed people. They poison us morally and physically: they kill the happiness of society: they force us to do away with our own liberties and to organize unnatural cruelties for fear they should rise against us and drag us down into their abyss. Only fools fear crime: we all fear poverty.

141. Undershaft: My religion? Well, my dear, I am a Millionaire. That is my religion.

148. Home life as we understand it is no more natural to us than a cage is natural to a cockatoo.

150. The whole strength of England lies in the fact that the enormous majority of the English people are snobs.

153. It is more dangerous to be a great prophet or poet than to promote twenty companies for swindling simple folk out of their savings.

161. All professions are conspiracies against the laity.

164. It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman hate or despise him.

175. I have to live for others and not for myself; that's middle-class morality.

176. Independence? That's middle-class blasphemy. We are all dependent on one another, every soul of us on earth.

178. Revolutionary movements attract those who are not good enough for established institutions as well as those who are too good for them.

180. The nauseous sham goodfellowship our democratic public men get up for shop use.

190. There have been summits of civilization at which heretics like Socrates, who was killed because he was wiser than his neighbors, have not been tortured, but ordered to kill themselves in the most painless manner known to their judges. But from that summit there was a speedy relapse into our present savagery.

197. Confusing monogamy with morality has done more to destroy the conscience of the human race than any other error.[2]

198. Physically there is nothing to distinguish human society from the farm-yard except that children are more troublesome and costly than chickens and calves, and that men and women are not so completely enslaved as farm stock.[3]

199. Customs will reconcile people to any atrocity.

216. Islam is the best religion, with the worst followers.

221. Europe is beginning to be enamored of the creed of Muhammad. In the next century I may go still further in recognizing the utility of that creed in solving its problems, and it is in this sense that you must understand my prediction.[8]

227. The customs of your tribe are not laws of nature.