George Bernard Shaw

What Englishman will give his mind to politics as long as he can afford to keep a motor car?

If you must hold yourself up to your children as an object lesson, hold yourself up as a warning and not an example.

A pessimist is a man who thinks everybody is as nasty as himself.

Life on board a pleasure steamer violates every moral and physical condition of healthy life except fresh air. It is a guzzling, lounging, gambling, dog’s life. The only alternative to excitement is irritability.

Property is organized robbery.

Hell is full of musical amateurs: music is the brandy of the damned.

But that intimacy of mutual embarrassment, in which each feels that the other is feeling something, having once existed, its effect is not to be done away with.

People are much more willing to lend you books than bookcases.

Fame is the perfume of heroic deeds.

Winners never quit and quitters never win.

Prudence operates on life in the same manner as rule of composition; it produces vigilance rather than elevation; rather prevents loss than procures advantage; and often miscarriages, but seldom reaches either power or honor.

A bird doesn’t sing because it has an answer, it sings because it has a song.

Do not waste your time on Social Questions. What is the matter with the poor is Poverty; what is the matter with the rich is Uselessness.

If they had not landed there would be some reason for celebrating the fact.

The savage bows down to idols of wood and stone: the civilized man to idols of flesh and blood.

To regret deeply is to live afresh.

The walking of Man is falling forwards.

What do sad complaints avail if the offense is not cut down by punishment.

We must substitute courage for caution.

For everything you have missed, you have gained something else; and for everything you gain, you lose something else.

On the death of a friend, we should consider that the fates through confidence have devolved on us the task of a double living, that we have henceforth to fulfill the promise of our friend’s life also, in our own, to the world.