303 quotes
The duke inquires contemptuously whether his gamekeeper is the equal of the Astronomer Royal; but he insists that they shall both be hanged equally if they murder him.
Maxims for Revolutionists (1903)
To disbelieve in marriage is easy: to love a married woman is easy; but to betray a comrade, to be disloyal to a host, to break the covenant of bread and salt, is impossible.
Pasteboard pies and paper flowers are being banished from the stage by the growth of that power of accurate observation which is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it...
Ah-ah-ah-ah-ow-ow-oo-oo!!! I ain't dirty: I washed me face and hands afore I come, I did!
Pygmalion (1912)
There are some men who are considered quite ugly, but who are more remarkable than pretty people. You often see that in artists.
Love Among the Artists (1900)
People are always blaming circumstances for what they are. I don't believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and, if they can't find them, make them.
Mrs. Warren's Profession (1893)
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.
Androcles and the Lion (1913)
Death is for many of us the gate of hell; but we are inside on the way out, not outside on the way in.
A Treatise on Parents and Children (1910)
Majesty: when a stupid man is doing something he is ashamed of, he always declares that it is his duty.
When I was young I observed that nine out of ten things I did were failures, so I did ten times more work.
Appropriate Technology : A Focus for the Nineties (1991)
[Chess] is a foolish expedient for making idle people believe they are doing something very clever, when they are only wasting their time.
The Irrational Knot (1905)
Decency is Indecency's Conspiracy of Silence.
Maxims for Revolutionists (1903)
Scratch an Englishman and find a Protestant.
Saint Joan (1923)
The first prison I ever saw had inscribed on it cease to do evil: learn to do well; but as the inscription was on the outside, the prisoners could not read it.
Preface to English Prisons Under Local Government by Sydney and Beatrice Webb (1922)
Those who understand evil pardon it.
Maxims for Revolutionists (1903)
"We know now that the soul is the body, and the body the soul. They tell us they are different because they want to persuade us that we can keep our souls if we let them make slaves of our bodies."
Heartbreak House (1919)
Just as the liar's punishment is, not in the least that he is not believed, but that he cannot believe any one else; so a guilty society can more easily be persuaded that any apparently innocent act is guilty than that any apparently guilty act is innocent.
Quintessence Of Ibsenism (1891)
An election is a moral horror, as bad as a battle except for the blood; a mud bath for every soul concerned in it.
Chloroform has done a lot of mischief. It's enabled every fool to be a surgeon.
The Doctor's Dilemma (1911)
I am not a teacher: only a fellow-traveller of whom you asked the way. I pointed ahead—ahead of myself as well as of you.