George Bernard Shaw

“Life isn't about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.”

“Make it a rule never to give a child a book you would not read yourself.”

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

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”

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

“It is easy - terribly easy - to shake a man's faith in himself. To take advantage of that, to break a man's spirit is devil's work.”

“You see things; you say, 'Why?' But I dream things that never were; and I say 'Why not?”

“If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience.”

“If I own a large part of Scotland, I can turn the people off the land practically into the sea or across the sea. I can take women in child-bearing and throw them into the snow and leave them there. That has been done. I can do it for no better reason than I think it is better to shoot deer on the l...”

“I’m an atheist and I thank God for it.”

“What is the use of writing plays, what is the use of writing anything, if there is not a will which finally moulds chaos itself into a race of gods.”

“If women were particular about men's characters, they would never get married at all.”

“Every person who has mastered a profession is a skeptic concerning it.”

“I am a Christian. That obliges me to be a Communist.”

“The first condition of progress is the removal of censorship.”

“General consultant to mankind.”

“You may remember that on earth—though of course we never confessed it—the death of anyone we knew, even those we liked best, was always mingled with a certain satisfaction at being finally done with them.”

“He knows nothing and thinks he knows everything. That points clearly to a political career.”

“Caesar was a man of great common sense and good taste, meaning thereby a man without originality or moral courage.”

“Find enough clever things to say, and you're a Prime Minister; write them down and you're a Shakespeare.”

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

“In heaven an angel is no one in particular.”

“Youth is a wonderful thing. What a crime to waste it on children.”

“Socialism, reduced to its simplest legal and practical expression, means the complete discarding of the institution of private property by transforming it into public property, and the division of the resultant public income equally and indiscriminately among the entire population.”

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

“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.”

“La science est une nouvelle religion et la désinfection est son eau bénite.”

“If all the economists were laid end to end, they'd never reach a conclusion.”

“Nothing is worth doing unless the consequences may be serious.”

“Virtue consists, not in abstaining from vice, but in not desiring it.”

“What you are to do without me I cannot imagine.”

“Those who do not know how to live must make a merit of dying.”

“The trouble with her is that she lacks the power of conversation but not the power of speech.”

“Marriage is good enough for the lower classes: they have facilities for desertion that are denied to us.”

“A man never tells you anything until you contradict him.”

“She had lost the art of conversation but not, unfortunately, the power of speech.”

“If you leave the smallest corner of your head vacant for a moment, other people's opinions will rush in from all quarters.”

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

“Statistics show that of those who contract the habit of eating, very few survive.”

“England and America are two countries separated by the same language.”

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

“You cannot be a hero without being a coward.”

“Science never solves a problem without creating ten more.”

“Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine and at last you create what you will.”

“Creation is a miracle of daily recurrence. 'A miracle a minute' would not be a bad slogan for God.”

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

“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.”

“Cruelty would be delicious if one could only find some sort of cruelty that didn't really hurt.”

“First love is only a little foolishness and a lot of curiosity.”

“If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance.”

“Dancing is a perpendicular expression of a horizontal desire.”

“It is dangerous to be sincere unless you are also stupid.”

“A little learning is a dangerous thing, but we must take that risk because a little is as much as our biggest heads can hold.”

“The possibilities are numerous once we decide to act and not react.”

“The heretic is always better dead. And mortal eyes cannot distinguish the saint from the heretic.”

“A government that robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.”

“We are all dependent on one another, every soul of us on earth.”

“Democracy is a device that ensures we shall be governed no better than we deserve.”

“I want to destroy ownership in order that possession and enjoyment may be raised to the highest point in every section of the community.”

“What is the matter with universities is that the students are school children, whereas it is of the very essence of university education that they should be adults.”

“What we want to see is the child in pursuit of the knowledge not the knowledge in pursuit of the child.”

“Only on paper has humanity yet achieved glory, beauty, truth, knowledge, virtue, and abiding love.”

“A fool's brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence University education.”

“Life contains but two tragedies. One is not to get your heart's desire; the other is to get it.”

“The best place to find God is in a garden. You can dig for him there.”

“No man who is occupied in doing a very difficult thing, and doing it very well, ever loses his self-respect.”

“Reading made Don Quixote a gentleman. Believing what he read made him mad.”

“Do not do unto others as you expect they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same.”

“Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.”

“You see things; and you say 'Why?' But I dream things that never were; and I say 'Why not?'”

“The fickleness of the women I love is only equalled by the infernal constancy of the women who love me.”

“The Old Testament God is a person with body parts and passions. The Church of England God has neither body, parts nor passions, and is therefore not a person.”