George Bernard Shaw

Reminiscences make one feel so deliciously aged and sad.

If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience.

Do not waste your time on Social Questions. What is the matter with the poor is Poverty; what is the matter with the rich is Uselessness.

I dread success. To have succeeded is to have finished one’s business on earth, like the male spider, who is killed by the female the moment he has succeeded in his courtship. I like a state of continual becoming, with a goal in front and not behind.

I never resist temptation, because I have found that things that are bad for me do not tempt me.

The secret of forgiving everything is to understand nothing.

The public is the only critic whose opinion is worth anything at all.

We must never cease to proclaim in fearless tones the great principles of freedom and the rights of man which are the joint inheritance of the English-speaking world and which through Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights, the Habeas Corpus, trial by jury, and the English common law find their most famous expression in the American Declaration of Independence.

The government who robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.

Fear follows crime and is its punishment.

We are long before we are convinced that happiness is never to be found; and each believes it possessed by others, to keep alive the hope of obtaining it for himself.

Out of intense complexities intense simplicities emerge.

For so many people, TV and movies may be the only way they understand people who aren’t like them. It becomes important for the world to see different images of each other, so that we can develop empathy and understanding.

There is no luck in literary reputation. They who make up the final verdict upon every book are not the partial and noisy readers of the hour when it appears; but a court as of angels, a public not to be bribed, not to be entreated, and not to be overawed, decides upon every man’s title to fame.

Slavery it is that makes slavery; freedom, freedom. The slavery of women happened when the men were slaves of kings.

If you want to get what you want give up being right.

Religion is nothing else but love of God and man.

Clouds come floating into my life, no longer to carry rain or usher storm, but to add color to my sunset sky.

He that has given today may, if he so please, take away tomorrow.

Do not undervalue the headache. While it is at its sharpest it seems a bad investment; but when relief begins, the unexpired remainder is worth $4 a minute.

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.