George Bernard Shaw

Animals are my friends… and I don’t eat my friends.

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

Revolutions have never lightened the burden of tyranny: they have only shifted it to another shoulder.

The ordinary man is an anarchist. He wants to do as he likes. He may want his neighbor to be governed, but he himself doesn’t want to be governed. He is mortally afraid of government officials and policemen.

There are two tragedies in life. One is not to get your heart’s desire. The other is to get it.

Silence is the most perfect expression of scorn.

Appreciation is a wonderful thing: It makes what is excellent in others belong to us as well.

We live thick and are in each other’s way, and stumble over one another, and I think we thus lose some respect for one another.

A man cannot free himself by any self-denying ordinances, neither by water nor potatoes, nor by violent possibilities, by refusing to swear, refusing to pay taxes, by going to jail, or by taking another man’s crops or squatting on his land. By none of these ways can he free himself; no, nor by paying his debts with money; only by obedience to his own genius.

The first step, my son, which one makes in the world, is the one on which depends the rest of our days.

The perch swallows the grub-worm, the pickerel swallows the perch, and the fisherman swallows the pickerel; and so all the chinks in the scale of being are filled.

Victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory however long and hard the road may be; for without victory there is no survival.

Words are but the signs of ideas.

I am very fond of truth, but not at all of martyrdom.

The education of the will is the object of our existence.

I did then what I knew how to do. Now that I know better, I do better.

A lot of power and bravery is practice. And some of that is taking the risk to try and be at the table. And then when you’re at the table, taking that first risk to open your mouth and risk being rejected.

We do not count a man’s years until he has nothing else to count.

A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.

God was satisfied with his own work, and that is fatal.

If any man cannot feel the power of God when he looks upon the stars, then I doubt whether he is capable of any feeling at all. [Ut haec ipsa qui non sentiat deorum vim habere is nihil omnino sensurus esse videatur.]