George Bernard Shaw

You have to choose between trusting to the natural stability of gold and the natural stability of the honesty and intelligence of the members of the Government. And, with due respect for these gentlemen, I advise you, as long as the Capitalist system lasts, to vote for gold.

Ladies and gentleman are permitted to have friends in the kennel, but not in the kitchen.

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

If you can’t get rid of the skeleton in your closet, you’d best teach it to dance.

Between persons of equal income there is no social distinction except the distinction of merit. Money is nothing: character, conduct, and capacity are everything. There would be great people and ordinary people and little people, but the great would always be those who had done great things, and never the idiots whose mothers had spoiled them and whose fathers had left them a hundred thousand a year; and the little would be persons of small minds and mean characters, and not poor persons who had never had a chance. That is why idiots are always in favor of inequality of income (their only chance of eminence), and the really great in favor of equality.

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

Self-sacrifice is the real miracle out of which all the reported miracles grow.

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

There are a lot of people who lie and get away with it, and that’s just a fact.

Beauty without expression is boring.

Nature is a mutable cloud which is always and never the same.

Fame must have enemies, as light must have gnats.

The secret source of humor is not joy but sorrow; there is no humor in Heaven.

Coal is a portable climate. It carries the heat of the tropics to Labrador and the polar circle; and it is the means of transporting itself whithersoever it is wanted. Watt and Stephenson whispered in the ear of mankind their secret, that a half-ounce of coal will draw two tons a mile, and coal carries coal, by rail and by boat, to make Canada as warm as Calcutta, and with its comfort brings its industrial power.

A character is like an acrostic or Alexandrian stanza; read it forward, backward, or across, it still spells the same thing.

Your depression is connected to your insolence and refusal to praise.

If one is lucky, a solitary fantasy can totally transform a million realities.

Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.

When you’ve got them by their wallets, their hearts and minds will follow.

If you want to make peace with your enemy, you have to work with your enemy. Then he becomes your partner.

I at least have so much to do in unraveling certain human lots, and seeing how they were woven and interwoven, that all the light I can command must be concentrated on this particular web, and not dispersed over that tempting range of relevancies called the universe.