George Bernard Shaw

When a man says money can do anything, that settles it: he hasn’t got any.

The secret of being miserable is to have leisure to bother about whether you are happy or not. The cure for it is occupation.

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

The world is populated in the main by people who should not exist.

There is nothing so bad or so good that you will not find an Englishman doing it; but you will never find an Englishman in the wrong. He does everything on principle. He fights you on patriotic principles; he robs you on business principles; he enslaves you on imperial principles.

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

Associate reverently, as much as you can, with your loftiest thoughts.

We should come home from adventures and perils and discoveries with new experiences and character.

Defeat in itself was part and parcel of the great gambling game of politics. A man who could not accept it and try again was not of the stuff of which leaders are made.

Out of love and hatred, out of earnings and borrowings and leadings and losses; out of sickness and pain; out of wooing and worshipping; out of traveling and voting and watching and caring; out of disgrace and contempt, comes our tuition in the serene and beautiful laws.

No one won the last war, and no one will win the next war.

I believe that every person is born with talent.

Our chief want in life is somebody who shall make us do what we can.

To deny people their human rights is to challenge their very humanity.

Say a word, say a thousand to me on the telephone and I shall choose the wrong one to cling to as though you had said it after long deliberation when only I provoked it from you, I will cling to it from among a thousand, to be provoked and hurl it back with something I mean no more than you meant that, something for you to cling to and retreat clinging to.

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

We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the Old World some weeks nearer to the New; but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad, flapping American ear will be that the Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough.

Part of her mystery is how she is calm in the storm and anxious in the quiet.

What is there that confers the noblest delight? What is that which swells a man’s breast with pride above that which any other experience can bring to him? Discovery! To know that you are walking where none others have walked; that you are beholding what human eye has not seen before; that you are breathing a virgin atmosphere. To give birth to an idea, to discover a great thought – an intellectual nugget, right under the dust of a field that many a brain-plough had gone over before. To find a new planet, to invent a new hinge, to find a way to make the lightning carry your messages. To be the first – that is the idea.

Friendship is the marriage of the soul, and this marriage is liable to divorce.

We learned about dignity and decency – that how hard you work matters more than how much you make… that helping others means more than just getting ahead yourself.