George Bernard Shaw

Socialism is the same as Communism, only better English.

Better see rightly on a pound a week than squint on a million.

Assassination is the extreme form of censorship.

You cannot be a hero without being a coward.

Go anywhere in England where there are natural, wholesome, contented, and really nice English people; and what do you always find? That the stables are the real center of the household.

Between persons of equal income there is no social distinction except the distinction of merit. Money is nothing: character, conduct, and capacity are everything. There would be great people and ordinary people and little people, but the great would always be those who had done great things, and never the idiots whose mothers had spoiled them and whose fathers had left them a hundred thousand a year; and the little would be persons of small minds and mean characters, and not poor persons who had never had a chance. That is why idiots are always in favor of inequality of income (their only chance of eminence), and the really great in favor of equality.

Life cannot subsist in society but by reciprocal concessions.

Our knowledge is the amassed thought and experience of innumerable minds.

Insist on yourself; never imitate. Your own gift you can present every moment with the cumulative force of a whole life’s cultivation; but of the adopted talent of another you have only an extemporaneous half possession.

Pain is less subject than pleasure to careless expression.

The use of travelling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are.

We are always too busy for our children; we never give them the time or interest they deserve. We lavish gifts upon them; but the most precious gift, our personal association, which means so much to them, we give grudgingly.

The whole history of the world is summed up in the fact that, when nations are strong, they are not always just, and when they wish to be just, they are no longer strong.

Our best history is still poetry.

Sometimes too much to drink is barely enough.

Time is but the stream I go fishing in. I drink at it, but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. It’s thin current slides away, but eternity remains.

Beware the barrenness of a busy life.

Keeping your body healthy is an expression of gratitude to the whole cosmos; trees, clouds, everything.

The mark of the man of the world is absence of pretension. He does not make a speech; he takes a low business-tone, avoids all brag, is nobody, dresses plainly, promises not at all, performs much, speaks in monosyllables, hugs his fact. He calls his employment by its lowest name, and so takes from evil tongues their sharpest weapon. His conversation clings to the weather and the news, yet he allows himself to be surprised into thought, and the unlocking of his learning and philosophy.

Cure the disease and kill the patient.

Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of the man. The biography of the man himself cannot be written.