George Bernard Shaw

All censorships exist to prevent anyone from challenging current conceptions and existing institutions. All progress is initiated by challenging current conceptions, and executed by supplanting existing institutions. Consequently the first condition of progress is the removal of censorships. There is the whole case against censorships in a nutshell.

What we call education and culture is for the most part nothing but the substitution of reading for experience, of literature for life, of the obsolete fictitious for the contemporary real.

The natural term of the affection of the human animal for its offspring is six years.

Hell is paved with good intentions, not with bad ones. All men mean well.

I dislike feeling at home when I am abroad.

Without art, the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable.

The older we grow the greater becomes our wonder at how much ignorance one can contain without bursting one’s clothes.

Music causes us to think eloquently.

When a resolute young fellow steps up to the great bully, the world, and takes him boldly by the beard, he is often surprised to find it comes off in his hand, and that it was only tied on to scare away the timid adventurers.

We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the Old World some weeks nearer to the New; but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad, flapping American ear will be that the Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough.

My favorite nightcap, after all this time, is still the cocktail of you.

Nakedness is uncomely, as well in mind as body, and it addeth no small reverence to men’s manners and actions if they be not altogether open. Therefore set it down: That a habit of secrecy is both politic and moral.

Every book is a quotation; and every house is a quotation out of all forests, and mines, and stone quarries; and every man is a quotation from all his ancestors.

The quieter you become, the more you can hear.

Disease generally begins that equality which death completes.

Does he council you better who bids you, Money, by right means, if you can: but by any means, make money?

Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.

Human life is everywhere a state in which much is to be endured, and little to be enjoyed.

Drag your thoughts away from your troubles… by the ears, by the heels, or any other way you can manage it.

I could have become a soldier if I had waited; I knew more about retreating than the man who invented retreating.

I have no doubt that it is a part of the destiny of the human race, in its gradual improvement, to leave off eating animals, as surely as the savage tribes have left off eating each other when they came in contact with the more civilized.