George Bernard Shaw

Hatred is the coward’s revenge for being intimidated.

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.

Virtue consists, not in abstaining from vice, but in not desiring it.

That is the whole secret of successful fighting. Get your enemy at a disadvantage; and never, on any account, fight him on equal terms.

Baseball has the great advantage over cricket of being sooner ended.

A man’s interest in the world is only an overflow from his interest in himself.

The joys of parents are secret, and so are their grieves and fears.

I am not able to instruct you. I can only tell that I have chosen wrong. I have passed my time in study without experience; in the attainment of sciences which can, for the most part, be but remotely useful to mankind. I have purchased knowledge at the expense of all the common comforts of life: I have missed the endearing elegance of female friendship, and the happy commerce of domestic tenderness.

In all private quarrels the duller nature is triumphant by reason of dullness.

It really boils down to this: that all life is interrelated. We are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.

Drive a nail home and clinch it so faithfully that you can wake up in the night and think of your work with satisfaction,a work at which you would not be ashamed to invoke the Muse.

Life will not bear refinement. You must do as other people do.

I don’t need an alarm clock. My ideas wake me.

Youth, which is forgiven everything, forgives itself nothing: age, which forgives itself everything, is forgiven nothing.

A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere. Before him I may think aloud. I am arrived at last in the presence of a man so real and equal, that I may drop even those undermost garments of dissimulation, courtesy, and second thought, which men never put off, and may deal with him with the simplicity and wholeness with which one chemical atom meets another.

Tyrants have always some slight shade of virtue; they support the laws before destroying them.

Pity is for living, envy is for dead.

Don’t go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first.

I have lived some thirty-odd years on this planet, and I have yet to hear the first syllable of valuable or even earnest advice from my seniors.

Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter.

I am admonished in many ways that time is pushing me inexorably along. I am approaching the threshold of age; in 1977 I shall be 142. This is no time to be flitting about the earth. I must cease from the activities proper to youth and begin to take on the dignities and gravities and inertia proper to that season of honorable senility which is on its way.