George Bernard Shaw

Perhaps the greatest social service that can be rendered by anybody to the country and to mankind is to bring up a family.

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

A Native American elder once described his own inner struggles in this manner: Inside of me there are two dogs. One of the dogs is mean and evil. The other dog is good. The mean dog fights the good dog all the time. When asked which dog wins, he reflected for a moment and replied, The one I feed the most. On Other Peoples Expectations: The only man who behaved sensibly was my tailor; he took my measurement anew every time he saw me, while all the rest went on with their old measurements and expected them to fit me.

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

How can you dare teach a man to read until you’ve taught him everything else first?

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

We are shut up in schools and college recitation rooms for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a belly-full of words and do not know a thing. The things taught in schools and colleges are not an education, but the means of education.

You’ve got a big, big problem if you get caught up in what people say. If you’re gonna live for what people say, you might as well lay down and forget it. Because it doesn’t work that way.

Technique is noticed most markedly in the case of those who have not mastered it.

Refrain from asking what going to happen tomorrow, and everyday that fortune grants you, count as gain.

We must rekindle the fire of idealism in our society, for nothing suffocates the promise of America more than unbounded cynicism and indifference.

We know now that the soul is the body, and the body the soul. They tell us they are different because they want to persuade us that we can keep our souls if we let them make slaves of our bodies.

If there be three distinct and separate Persons, then three distinct and separate Substances. . . . And since the Father is God, the Son is God, and the Spirit is God . . . then unless the Father, Son and Spirit are three distinct Nothings, they must be three distinct Substances, and consequently three distinct Gods.

A man makes inferiors his superiors by heat; self-control is the rule.

Love of beauty is taste. The creation of beauty is art.

Classical quotation is the parole of literary men all over the world.

I have heard with admiring submission the experience of the lady who declared that the sense of being perfectly well dressed gives a feeling of inward tranquility which religion is powerless to bestow.

It is seldom that the miserable of the world can help regarding their misery as a wrong inflicted by those who are less miserable.

To know that we know what we know, and that we do not know what we do not know, that is true knowledge.

If they had not landed there would be some reason for celebrating the fact.

We must hold a man amenable to reason for the choice of his daily craft or profession. It is not an excuse any longer for his deeds that they are the custom of his trade. What business has he with an evil trade?