George Bernard Shaw

Men have to do some awfully mean things to keep up their respectability.

I want to be all used up when I die.

Money is indeed the most important thing in the world; and all sound and successful personal and national morality should have this fact for its basis.

If all the economists were laid end to end, they would not reach a conclusion.

Hegel was right when he said that we learn from history that man can never learn anything from history.

Hatred is the coward’s revenge for being intimidated.

There is a time when a man distinguishes the idea of felicity from the idea of wealth; it is the beginning of wisdom.

If pleasure was not followed by pain, who would forbear it?

No matter how often you are defeated, you are born to victory.

He is a benefactor of mankind who contracts the great rules of life into short sentences, that may be easily impressed on the memory, and so recur habitually to the mind.

Beautiful credit! The foundation of modern society. Who shall say that this is not the golden age of mutual trust, of unlimited reliance upon human promises? That is a peculiar condition of society which enables a whole nation to instantly recognize point and meaning in the familiar newspaper anecdote, which puts into the mouth of a distinguished speculator in lands and mines this remark: – I wasn’t worth a cent two years ago, and now I owe two millions of dollars.

Every man has a right to utter what he thinks truth, and every other man has a right to knock him down for it. Martyrdom is the test.

The key to every man is his thought. Sturdy and defying though he look, he has a helm which he obeys, which is the idea after which all his facts are classified. He can only be reformed by showing him a new idea which commands his own.

O imitators, you slavish herd!

I’m not a teacher: only a fellow-traveler of whom you asked the way. I pointed ahead – ahead of myself as well as you.

It requires a great deal of boldness and a great deal of caution to make a great fortune, and when you have it, it requires ten times as much skill to keep it.

But you must pay for conformity. All goes well as long as you run with conformists. But you, who are honest men in other particulars, know, that there is alive somewhere a man whose honesty reaches to this point also, that he shall not kneel to false gods, and, on the day when you meet him, you sink into the class of counterfeits.

I do not say that I’ll depart tomorrow because even today I still arrive.

Whosoever is delighted in solitude is either a wild beast or a god.

The affairs of the world will go on forever. Do not delay the practice of meditation.

Whoever has lived long enough to find out what life is, knows how deep a debt of gratitude we owe to Adam, the first great benefactor of our race. He brought death into the world.