George Bernard Shaw

Patriotism is a pernicious, psychopathic form of idiocy.

We learn from experience that men never learn anything from experience.

If you value a man’s regard, strive with him. As to liking, you like your newspaper – and despise it.

The minority is sometimes right; the majority always wrong.

Physically there is nothing to distinguish human society from the farm-yard except that children are more troublesome and costly than chickens and calves and that men and women are not so completely enslaved as farm stock.

It took me twenty years of studied self-restraint, aided by the natural decay of my faculties, to make myself dull enough to be accepted as a serious person by the British public.

When you can’t make them see the light, make them feel the heat.

The eye is easily frightened.

True irreverence is disrespect for another man’s god.

Sir, a man may be so much of everything, that he is nothing of anything.

We hate the kindness which we understand.

Fine manners need the support of fine manners in others.

He does not care for flowers. Calls them rubbish, and cannot tell one from another, and thinks it is superior to feel like that.

If a man is proud of his wealth, he should not be praised until it is known how he employs it.

Most people have never learned that one of the main aims in life is to enjoy it.

Men use thought only as authority for their injustice, and employ speech only to conceal their thoughts.

Nothing can be more contrary to religion and the clergy than reason and common sense.

Believing that I was born for the service of mankind, and regarding the care of the commonwealth as a kind of common property which, like the air and the water, belongs to everybody, I set myself to consider in what way mankind might be best served, and what service I was myself best fitted by nature to perform.

He will be loved when dead, who was envied when he was living.

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

Every man is an impossibility until he is born.