George Bernard Shaw

Morality is suspecting other people of not being legally married.

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.

Why, except as a means of livelihood, a man should desire to act on the stage when he has the whole world to act in, is not clear to me.

You are all fundamentalists with a top dressing of science. That is why you are the stupidest of conservatives and reactionists in politics and the most bigoted of obstructionists in science itself. When it comes to getting a move on you are all of the same opinion: stop it, flog it, hang it, dynamite it, stamp it out.

This is the true joy in life: Being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one, being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances, complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community and as long as I live, it is my privilege to do for it what I can. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for the moment and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.

No question is so difficult to answer as that which the answer is obvious.

Slavery it is that makes slavery; freedom, freedom. The slavery of women happened when the men were slaves of kings.

To do something, say something, see something, before anybody else – these are things that confer a pleasure compared with which other pleasures are tame and commonplace, other ecstasies cheap and trivial.

When people do not respect us we are sharply offended; yet deep down in his private heart no man much respects himself.

Climate is what we expect, weather is what we get.

O friend, never strike sail to a fear! Come into port greatly, or sail with God the seas.

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

We lie in the lap of immense intelligence.

Life is the art of drawing sufficient conclusions from insufficient premises.

The man with a toothache thinks everyone happy whose teeth are sound. The poverty-stricken man makes the same mistake about the rich man.

I have never accepted what many people have kindly said-namely that I inspired the nation. Their will was resolute and remorseless, and as it proved, unconquerable. It fell to me to express it.

My mother said I must always be intolerant of ignorance but understanding of illiteracy. That some people, unable to go to school, were more educated and more intelligent than college professors.

The volatile truth of our words should continually betray the inadequacy of the residual statement.

Birth and death are so closely related that one could not destroy either without destroying the other at the same time. It is extinction that makes creation possible.

Here there is no hope, and consequently no duty, no work, nothing to be gained by praying, nothing to be lost by doing what you like. Hell, in short, is a place where you have nothing to do but amuse yourself.

Look to make your course regular, that men may know beforehand what they may expect.