A gentleman is one who puts more into the world than he takes out.

Better keep yourself clean and bright; you are the window through which you must see the world.

Beware of false knowledge; it is more dangerous than ignorance.

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

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

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

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.

A man never tells you anything until you contradict him.

A man of great common sense and good taste - meaning thereby a man without originality or moral courage.

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.

A perpetual holiday is a good working definition of hell.

All great truths begin as blasphemies.

Americans adore me and will go on adoring me until I say something nice about them.

An asylum for the sane would be empty in America.

An Englishman thinks he is moral when he is only uncomfortable.

Animals are my friends... and I don't eat my friends.

Assassination is the extreme form of censorship.

Beauty is all very well at first sight; but who ever looks at it when it has been in the house three days?

Beware of the man who does not return your blow: he neither forgives you nor allows you to forgive yourself.

Censorship ends in logical completeness when nobody is allowed to read any books except the books that nobody reads.

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

Clever and attractive women do not want to vote; they are willing to let men govern as long as they govern men.

Democracy is a device that insures we shall be governed no better than we deserve.

Democracy is a form of government that substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few.

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

Do not waste your time on Social Questions. What is the matter with the poor is Poverty ...

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

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

Everything happens to everybody sooner or later if there is time enough.

Few of us have vitality enough to make any of our instincts imperious.

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.

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

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

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

He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches.

Home life is no more natural to us than a cage is natural to a cockatoo.

I dislike feeling at home when I am abroad.

Human beings are the only animals of which I am thoroughly and cravenly afraid.

I am afraid we must make the world honest before we can honestly say to our children that honesty is the best policy.

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

I never resist temptation, because I have found that things that are bad for me do not tempt me.

I never thought much of the courage of a lion tamer. Inside the cage he is at least safe from people.

I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake.

I would like to take you seriously, but to do so would be an affront to your intelligence.

I'm an atheist and I thank God for it.

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

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

If there was nothing wrong in the world there wouldn't be anything for us to do.

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

If you can't get rid of the skeleton in your closet, you'd best teach it to dance. If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance.

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

If you must hold yourself up to your children as an object lesson, hold yourself up as a warning and not as an example.

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

In a battle all you need to make you fight is a little hot blood and the knowledge that it's more dangerous to lose than to win.

In this world there is always danger for those who are afraid of it.

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

It is a curious sensation: the sort of pain that goes mercifully beyond our powers of feeling. When your heart is broken, your boats are burned: nothing matters any more. It is the end of happiness and the beginning of peace.

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

It is most unwise for people in love to marry.

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

It's so hard to know what to do when one wishes earnestly to do right.

Just do what must be done. This may not be happiness, but it is greatness.

Kings are not born: they are made by artificial hallucination.

Lack of money is the root of all evil.

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

Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh.

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

Life levels all men. Death reveals the eminent.

Love is a gross exaggeration of the difference between one person and everybody else.

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

Marriage is an alliance entered into by a man who can't sleep with the window shut, and a woman who can't sleep with the window open.

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

Marriage is popular because it combines the maximum of temptation with the maximum of opportunity.

Martyrdom: The only way a man can become famous without ability.

Men are wise in proportion, not to their experience, but to their capacity for experience.

Men have to do some awfully mean things to keep up their respectability.

Miracles, in the sense of phenomena we cannot explain, surround us on every hand: life itself is the miracle of miracles.

Most people do not pray; they only beg.

No man ever believes that the Bible means what it says: He is always convinced that it says what he means.

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

No question is so difficult to answer as that to which the answer is obvious.

Nothing is ever done in this world until men are prepared to kill one another if it is not done.

Nothing is worth doing unless the consequences may be serious.

Old men are dangerous: it doesn't matter to them what is going to happen to the world.

One man that has a mind and knows it can always beat ten men who haven't and don't.

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

Peace is not only better than war, but infinitely more arduous.

People become attached to their burdens sometimes more than the burdens are attached to them.

People who say it cannot be done should not interrupt those who are doing it.

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

Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.

Property is organized robbery.

Reading made Don Quixote a gentleman, but believing what he read made him mad.

Science never solves a problem without creating ten more.

Self-sacrifice enables us to sacrifice other people without blushing.

Silence is the most perfect expression of scorn.

Socialism is the same as Communism, only better English.

Some look at things that are, and ask why. I dream of things that never were and ask why not?

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

Success does not consist in never making mistakes but in never making the same one a second time.

Syllables govern the world.

Take care to get what you like or you will be forced to like what you get.

The art of government is the organisation of idolatry.

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

The British soldier can stand up to anything except the British War Office.

The faults of the burglar are the qualities of the financier.

The first condition of progress is the removal of censorship.

The frontier between hell and heaven is only the difference between two ways of looking at things.

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

The liar's punishment is not in the least that he is not believed, but that he cannot believe anyone else.

The love of economy is the root of all virtue.

The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and about all time.

The man with a toothache thinks everyone happy whose teeth are sound. The poverty-stricken man makes the same mistake about the rich man.

The minority is sometimes right; the majority always wrong.

The moment we want to believe something, we suddenly see all the arguments for it, and become blind to the arguments against it.

The only secrets are the secrets that keep themselves.

The only service a friend can really render is to keep up your courage by holding up to you a mirror in which you can see a noble image of yourself.

The only way to avoid being miserable is not to have enough leisure to wonder whether you are happy or not.

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.

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

The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it.

The test of a man or woman's breeding is how they behave in a quarrel.

The things most people want to know about are usually none of their business.

The truth is, hardly any of us have ethical energy enough for more than one really inflexible point of honor.

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

There is no satisfaction in hanging a man who does not object to it.

There is no subject on which more dangerous nonsense is talked and thought than marriage.

There is nothing more dangerous than the conscience of a bigot.

There is only one religion, though there are a hundred versions of it.

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

Until the men of action clear out the talkers we who have social consciences are at the mercy of those who have none.

Use your health, even to the point of wearing it out. That is what it is for. Spend all you have before you die; do not outlive yourself.

Very few people can afford to be poor.

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

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

We are made wise not by the recollection of our past, but by the responsibility for our future.

We are the only real aristocracy in the world: the aristocracy of money.

We don't stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing.

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

We must always think about things, and we must think about things as they are, not as they are said to be.

What a man believes may be ascertained, not from his creed, but from the assumptions on which he habitually acts.

When a man says money can do anything, that settles it: he hasn't got any.

When I was young I observed that nine out of every ten things I did were failures, so I did ten times more work.

When a man wants to murder a tiger he calls it sport; when a tiger wants to murder him he calls it ferocity.

Which painting in the National Gallery would I save if there was a fire? The one nearest the door of course.

Why should we take advice on sex from the pope? If he knows anything about it, he shouldn't!

You are going to let the fear of poverty govern you life and your reward will be that you will eat, but you will not live.

You cannot be a hero without being a coward.

You use a glass mirror to see your face; you use works of art to see your soul.

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

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

all quotes on this page are by ~ George Bernard Shaw

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