George Bernard Shaw

The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and, if they can’t find them, make them.

Common people do not pray; they only beg.

The faults of the burglar are the qualities of the financier.

Capitalism has destroyed our belief in any effective power but that of self interest backed by force.

If you can’t get rid of the skeleton in your closet, you’d best teach it to dance.

Hegel was right when he said that we learn from history that man can never learn anything from history.

Success must include two things: the development of an individual to his utmost potentiality and a contribution of some kind to one’s world.

Every man has a right to utter what he thinks truth, and every other man has a right to knock him down for it. Martyrdom is the test.

Use, do not abuse; neither abstinence nor excess ever renders man happy.

They must first judge themselves, that presume to censure others: And such will not be apt to overshoot the Mark. We are too ready to retaliate, rather than forgive, or gain by Love and Information. And yet we could hurt no Man that we believe loves us. Let us then try what Love will do: For if Men did once see we Love them, we should soon find they would not harm us. Force may subdue, but Love gains: And he that forgives first, wins the [Laurel]. If I am even with my Enemy, the Debt is paid; but if I forgive it, I oblige him for ever.

Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.

That was Youth with its reckless exuberance when all things were possible pursued by Age where we are now, looking back at what we destroyed, what we tore away from that self who could do more, and its work that’s become my enemy because that’s what I can tell you about, that Youth who could do anything.

If you can’t fly, then run, if you can’t walk run, then walk, if you can’t walk, then crawl, but by all means keep moving.

The ornament of a house is the friends who frequent it.

If I seem to boast more than is becoming, my excuse is that I brag for humanity rather than for myself.

In the highest civilization, the book is still the highest delight. He who has once known its satisfactions is provided with a resource against calamity.

Morality is suspecting other people of not being legally married.

Once a word has been allowed to escape, it cannot be recalled.

By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote. In fact it is as difficult to appropriate the thoughts of others as it is to invent.

There is this to be said in favor of drinking, that it takes the drunkard first out of society, then out of the world.

From now on, ending a sentence with a preposition is something up with which I will not put.