George Bernard Shaw

Democracy substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few.

Martyrdom is the only way a man can become famous without ability.

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

How can what an Englishman believes be hearsay? It is a contradiction in terms.

If women were as fastidious as men, morally or physically, there would be an end of the race.

We learn from experience that men never learn anything from experience.

One wanders to the left, another to the right. Both are equally in error, but, are seduced by different delusions.

The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.

The luster of diamonds is invigorated by the interposition of darker bodies; the lights of a picture are created by the shades; the highest pleasure which nature has indulged to sensitive perception is that of rest after fatigue.

It seems to me that the god that is commonly worshipped in civilized countries is not at all divine, though he bears a divine name, but is the overwhelming authority and respectability of mankind combined. Men reverence one another, not yet God.

Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all.

I feel nothing but the accursed happiness I have dreaded all my life long: the happiness that comes as life goes, the happiness of yielding and dreaming instead of resisting and doing, the sweetness of the fruit that is going rotten.

The rule is perfect: in all matters of opinion our adversaries are insane.

It is in these acts called trivialities that the seeds of joy are forever wasted, until men and women look round with haggard faces at the devastation their own waste has made, and say, the earth bears no harvest of sweetness – calling their denial knowledge.

I talk democracy to these men and women. I tell them that they have the vote, and that theirs is the kingdom and the power and the glory. I say to them You are supreme: exercise your power. They say, That’s right: tell us what to do; and I tell them. I say Exercise our vote intelligently by voting for me. And they do. That’s democracy; and a splendid thing it is too for putting the right men in the right place.

Hitch your wagon to a star.

Many a small thing has been made large by the right kind of advertising.

Only a stomach that rarely feels hungry scorns common things.

It is said that the world is in a state of bankruptcy, that the world owes the world more than the world can pay.

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

There is nothing makes a man suspect much, more than to know little, and therefore men should remedy suspicion by procuring to know more, and not keep their suspicions in smother.