George Bernard Shaw

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

The moment we want to believe something, we suddenly see all the arguments for it, and become blind to the arguments against it.

A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.

Why should we take advice on sex from the pope? If he knows anything about it, he shouldn’t!

There is only one religion, though there are a hundred versions of it.

There are no secrets better kept than the secrets that everybody guesses.

The serpent if it wants to become the dragon must eat itself.

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.

The Jews generally give value. They make you pay; but they deliver the goods. In my experience the men who want something for nothing are invariably Christians.

The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons.

I don’t think the human mind can comprehend the past and the future. They are both just illusions that can manipulate you into thinking theres some kind of change.

The way in which men cling to old institutions after the life has departed out of them, and out of themselves, reminds me of those monkeys which cling by their tails – aye, whose tails contract about the limbs, even the dead limbs, of the forest, and they hang suspended beyond the hunter’s reach long after they are dead. It is of no use to argue with such men. They have not an apprehensive intellect, but merely, as it were a prehensile tail.

Friendships begin with liking or gratitude roots that can be pulled up.

An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man.

The highest panegyric, therefore, that private virtue can receive, is the praise of servants.

To be idle and to be poor have always been reproaches, and therefore every man endeavors with his utmost care to hide his poverty from others, and his idleness from himself.

Adversity has ever been considered the state in which a man most easily becomes acquainted with himself.

The correlative to loving our neighbors as ourselves is hating ourselves as we hate our neighbors.

Real practice has no purpose or direction, so it can include everything that comes.

The longer we dwell on our misfortunes, the greater is their power to harm us.

A good memory and a tongue tied in the middle is a combination which gives immortality to conversation.