George Bernard Shaw

No man ever believes that the Bible means what it says: He is always convinced that it says what he means.

When a thing is funny, search it carefully for a hidden truth.

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

The great secret, Eliza, is not having bad manners or good manners or any other particular sort of manners, but having the same manner for all human souls: in short, behaving as if you were in Heaven, where there are no third-class carriages, and one soul is as good as another.

Home life is no more natural to us than a cage is natural to a cockatoo.

I don’t want to talk grammar. I want to talk like a lady.

Only that day dawns to which we are awake.

Dictionaries are like watches; the worst is better than none, and the best cannot be expected to be quite true.

For who is pleased with himself.

Pessimism is only the name that men of weak nerve give to wisdom.

We have a problem. Congratulations. But it’s a tough problem. Then double congratulations.

You will have bad times, but they will always wake you up to the stuff you weren’t paying attention to.

Liberty is slow fruit. It is never cheap; it is made difficult because freedom is the accomplishment and perfectness of man.

I have lived eighty years of life and know nothing for it, but to be resigned and tell myself that flies are born to be eaten by spiders and man to be devoured by sorrow.

We must annex those people. We can afflict them with our wise and beneficent government. We can introduce the novelty of thieves, all the way up from street-car pickpockets to municipal robbers and Government defaulters, and show them how amusing it is to arrest them and try them and then turn them loose – some for cash and some for political influence. We can make them ashamed of their simple and primitive justice. We can make that little bunch of sleepy islands the hottest corner on earth, and array it in the moral splendor of our high and holy civilization. Annexation is what the poor islanders need. Shall we to men benighted, the lamp of life deny?

If you have good thoughts, they will shine out of your face like sun beams and you will always look lovely!

It is not enough to conquer; one must learn to seduce.

Such is the state of life, that none are happy but by the anticipation of change: the change itself is nothing; when we have made it, the next wish is to change again.

A genius can never expect to have a good time anywhere, if he is a genuine article, but America is about the last place in which life will be endurable at all for an inspired writer of any kind.

See one promontory, one mountain, one sea, one river and see all.

At the entrance of a second person, hypocrisy begins.