George Bernard Shaw Quotes

Formal religion was organized for slaves: it offered them consolation which earth did not provide.

Slavery is the ultimate and greatest evil. For it is based on a denial of the dignity of the human soul.

The fanatical atheists are like slaves who are still feeling the weight of their chains which they have thrown off after hard struggle. They are creatures who—in their grudge against traditional religion as the "opium of the masses"—cannot hear the music of the spheres.

You cant get beyond the body unless you free the body itself.

Being born is like being kidnapped. And then sold into slavery. People are working every minute. The machinery is always going. Even when you sleep.

The slave-breeders and slave-traders, are a small, odious and detested class, among you; and yet in politics, they dictate the course of all of you, and are as completely your masters, as you are the master of your own negroes.

When you believe, or are led to believe, you are unable to act upon the greatest desires of the soul, the result is mental and spiritual enslavement.

The slave labors, but with no cheer - it is not the road to respectability, it will honor him with no citizens' trust, it brings no bread to his family, no grain to his garner, no leisure in after-days, no books or papers to his children. It opens no school-house door, builds no church, rears for him no factory, lays no keel, fills no bank, earns no acres. With sweat and toil and ignorance he consumes his life, to pour the earnings into channels from which he does no drink, into hands that never honor him. But perpetually rob and often torment.

Armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few.

They're not leading our people toward any kind of independence, but they're using their positions and their education and their talent to exploit our people worse than the slave master did during slavery.

The degradation, the wrongs, the vices, that grow out of slavery, are more than I can describe. They are greater than you would willingly believe.

Do we always make our freedom out of someone else's bondage?

The man who produces while others dispose of his product is a slave.

Slavery is ...an atrocious debasement of human nature.

Slavery was never abolished, it was only extended to include all the colors.

There were always more Negroes in the field than there was Negroes in the house. The Negro in the field caught hell. He ate leftovers. In the house they ate high up on the hog. The Negro in the field didn't get nothing but what was left of the insides of the hog. They call 'em "chitt'lin'" nowadays. In those days they called them what they were: guts. That's what you were -- a gut-eater. And some of you all still gut-eaters.

Good masters generally have bad slaves, and bad slaves have good masters.

Body is not veiled from soul, neither soul from body, Yet no man hath ever seen a soul.

Never before in human history have so few owed so much to so many, Mr. Jiabao. A handful of men in this country have trained the remaining 99.9 percent—as strong, as talented, as inteligent in every way—to exist in perpetual servitude; a servitude so strong that you can put the key of his emancipation in a man's hands and he will throw it back at you with a curse.

Base is the slave that pays.

I am against slavery simply because I dislike slaves.

You say, Wait a minute, God, you spared me from a slave job in an office, and now I have a slave job onstage. I am not on that clock no more.

O neglectful Nature, wherefore art thou thus partial, becoming to some of thy children a tender and benignant mother, to others a most cruel and ruthless stepmother? I see thy children given into slavery to others without ever receiving any benefit, and in lieu of any reward for the services they have done for them they are repaid by the severest punishments.

The doctrine that 'human rights' are superior to 'property rights' simply means that some human beings have the right to make property out of others.

When the slave auctioneer asked in what he was proficient, he replied, "In ruling people."