George Bernard Shaw

Reading made Don Quixote a gentleman, but believing what he read made him mad.

An index is a great leveller.

Socialism is the same as Communism, only better English.

You use a glass mirror to see your face; you use works of art to see your soul.

An election is a moral horror, as bad as a battle except for the blood; a mud bath for every soul concerned in it.

Miracles, in the sense of phenomena we cannot explain, surround us on every hand: life itself is the miracle of miracles.

I believe we are still so innocent. The species are still so innocent that a person who is apt to be murdered believes that the murderer, just before he puts the final wrench on his throat, will have enough compassion to give him one sweet cup of water.

I have a higher and grander standard of principle than George Washington. He could not lie; I can, but I won’t.

What is truth? said jesting Pilate; and would not stay for an answer.

One soweth and another reapeth is a verity that applies to evil as well as good.

Truth arises more readily from error than from confusion.

In a good bookroom you feel in some mysterious way that you are absorbing the wisdom contained in all the books through your skin, without even opening them.

What old people say you cannot do, you try and find that you can. Old deeds for old people, and new deeds for new.

Having power is not nearly as important as what you choose to do with it.

Democracy is a form of government that substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few.

I enjoy convalescence. It is the part that makes the illness worth while.

Life is a disease; and the only difference between one man and another is the stage of the disease at which he lives. You are always at the crisis: I am always in the convalescent stage.

Let your boat of life be light, packed with only what you need – a homely home and simple pleasures, one or two friends, worth the name, someone to love and someone to love you, a cat, a dog, and a pipe or two, enough to eat and enough to wear, and a little more than enough to drink; for thirst is a dangerous thing.

It is wonderful when a calculation is made, how little the mind is actually employed in the discharge of any profession.

The surest poison is time.

That devilish Iron Horse, whose ear-rending neigh is heard throughout the town, has muddied the Boiling Spring with his foot, and he it is that has browsed off all the woods on Walden shore, that Trojan horse, with a thousand men in his belly, introduced by mercenary Greeks! Where is the country’s champion, the Moore of Moore Hall, to meet him at the Deep Cut and thrust an avenging lance between the ribs of the bloated pest?