George Bernard Shaw

1856–1950 · Irish playwright, critic & Nobel laureate

George Bernard Shaw was an Irish dramatist and critic whose plays — Pygmalion, Man and Superman, Saint Joan — paired wit with social argument, and who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1925. His genuine epigrams are so quotable that he has become one of the internet’s great magnets for invented one-liners. This is one of them: the paradox about youth suits his voice, but it was newspaper wits, not Shaw’s pen, that put it into circulation.

Traced to source

5 quotes we’ve traced to George Bernard Shaw

“A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing”

Verified

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself”

Verified

“England and America are two countries separated by a common language”

Attributed

“Those who can, do; those who cannot, teach”

Disputed

“Youth is wasted on the young”

Disputed

Not actually George Bernard Shaw

Often misattributed to George Bernard Shaw

Famous lines widely pinned on George Bernard Shaw that we’ve traced to someone else.

“I learned long ago never to wrestle with a pig. You get dirty, and besides, the pig likes it”

actually Anonymous (popularized by Cyrus S. Ching)

“If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas”

actually Charles F. Brannan (apple version); origin traces to an anonymous 1917 magazine advertisement

“It is the mark of a truly intelligent person to be moved by statistics”

actually Bertrand Russell

“Success does not consist in never making blunders, but in never making the same one a second time”

actually Josh Billings (Henry Wheeler Shaw)

On the research bench

Commonly pinned on George Bernard Shaw — under review

3 lines flagged as pinned on George Bernard Shaw and queued for a full source trace — not yet verified.

“Few people think more than two or three times a year; I have made an international reputation for myself by thinking once or twice a week.”

Disputed

“If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they'll kill you.”

Disputed

“The longer I live, the more I am inclined to the belief that this earth is used by other planets as a lunatic asylum.”

Disputed

Did they really say it?

Thought George Bernard Shaw said something else?

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