George Bernard Shaw

Vulgarity in a king flatters the majority of the nation.

Girls, like men, want to be petted, pitied, and made much of, when they are diffident, in low spirits, or in unrequited love. These are services which the weak cannot render to the strong and which the strong will not render to the weak, except when there is also a difference of sex.

In order to fully realize how bad a popular play can be, it is necessary to see it twice.

We must make the world honest before we can honestly say to our children that honesty is the best policy.

Property is organized robbery.

Some men see things as they are and ask why. Others dream things that never were and ask why not.

If the single man plant himself indomitably on his instincts, and there abide, the huge world will come round to him.

Trust men and they will be true to you; treat them greatly and they will show themselves great.

By avarice and selfishness, and a groveling habit, from which none of us is free, of regarding the soil as property, or the means of acquiring property chiefly, the landscape is deformed, husbandry is degraded with us, and the farmer leads the meanest of lives. He knows Nature but as a robber.

Logic is a poor guide compared with custom.

The wound is the place where the light enters you.

Only an inventor knows how to borrow, and every man is or should be an inventor.

Poets, like friends to whom you are in debt, you hate.

Solitary trees, if they grow at all, grow strong.

A good indignation brings out all one’s powers.

I am stronger than my fear.

It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations. Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations is an admirable work, and I studied it intently. The quotations when engraved upon the memory give you good thoughts. They also make you anxious to read the authors and look for more.

A great man is always willing to be little.

Republics abound in young civilians who believe that the laws make the city, that grave modifications of the policy and modes of living and employments of the population, that commerce, education and religion may be voted in or out; and that any measure, though it were absurd, may be imposed on a people if only you can get sufficient voices to make it a law. But the wise know that foolish legislation is a rope of sand which perishes in the twisting; that the State must follow and not lead the character and progress of the citizen; that the form of government which prevails is the expression of what cultivation exists in the population which permits it. The law is only a memorandum.

Whatever you have spend less.

Possession isn’t nine-tenths of the law. It’s nine-tenths of the problem.