George Bernard Shaw

A miracle is an event which creates faith. That is the purpose and nature of miracles. Frauds deceive. An event which creates faith does not deceive: therefore it is not a fraud, but a miracle.

When I was young, I observed that nine out of ten things I did were failures. So I did ten times more work.

You must not suppose, because I am a man of letters, that I never tried to earn an honest living.

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.

An asylum for the sane would be empty in America.

Perhaps the greatest social service that can be rendered by anybody to the country and to mankind is to bring up a family.

Only a man’s character is the real criterion of worth.

The man who lets himself be bored is even more contemptible than the bore.

Let him that would move the world, first move himself.

When we give cheerfully and accept gratefully, everyone is blessed.

By his machines man can dive and remain under water like a shark; can fly like a hawk in the air; can see atoms like a gnat; can see the system of the universe of Uriel, the angel of the sun; can carry whatever loads a ton of coal can lift; can knock down cities with his fist of gunpowder; can recover the history of his race by the medals which the deluge, and every creature, civil or savage or brute, has involuntarily dropped of its existence; and divine the future possibility of the planet and its inhabitants by his perception of laws of nature.

Hitch your wagon to a star. Let us not fag in paltry works which serve our pot and bag alone.

Injustice in the end produces independence.

Have a care, therefore, where there is more sail than ballast.

I know no religion that destroys courtesy, civility, and kindness.

Truth often suffers more by the heat of its defenders than the arguments of its opposers.

He is a benefactor of mankind who contracts the great rules of life into short sentences, that may be easily impressed on the memory, and so recur habitually to the mind.

If a thousand men were not to pay their tax-bills this year, that would not be a violent and bloody measure, as it would be to pay them, and enable the State to commit violence and shed innocent blood. This is, in fact, the definition of a peaceable revolution, if any such is possible.

You perceive I generalize with intrepidity from single instances. It is the tourist’s custom.

It is long ere we discover how rich we are. Our history, we are sure, is quite tame: we have nothing to write, nothing to infer. But our wiser years still run back to the despised recollections of childhood, and always we are fishing up some wonderful article out of that pond; until, by and by, we begin to suspect that the biography of the one foolish person we know is, in reality, nothing less than the miniature paraphrase of the hundred volumes of the Universal History.

Never do anything by halves if you want to get away with it. Be outrageous. Go the whole hog. Make sure everything you do is so completely crazy it’s unbelievable.