George Bernard Shaw

Reminiscences make one feel so deliciously aged and sad.

The secret of forgiving everything is to understand nothing.

As long as I can conceive something better than myself I cannot be easy unless I am striving to bring it into existence or clearing the way for it.

Money is the most important thing in the world. It represents health, strength, honor, generosity, and beauty as conspicuously as the want of it represents illness, weakness, disgrace, meanness, and ugliness.

The thought of two thousand people crunching celery at the same time horrified me.

In order to fully realize how bad a popular play can be, it is necessary to see it twice.

Ask for what you want and be prepared to get it!

Work is a necessary evil to be avoided.

This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it.

Conscience is thoroughly well-bred and soon leaves off talking to those who do not wish to hear it.

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.

Nothing that grieves us can be called little: by the eternal laws of proportion a child’s loss of a doll and a king’s loss of a crown are events of the same size.

Prejudice not being funded on reason cannot be removed by argument.

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

The highest compact we can make with our fellow is – Let there be truth between us two forevermore.

Letters are like wine; if they are sound they ripen with keeping. A man should lay down letters as he does a cellar of wine.

Man was made at the end of the week’s work when God was tired.

You may not always have a comfortable life and you will not always be able to solve all of the world’s problems at once but don’t ever underestimate the importance you can have because history has shown us that courage can be contagious and hope can take on a life of its own.

Judged by every standard which history has applied to Governments, the Soviet Government of Russia is one of the worst tyrannies that has ever existed in the world. It accords no political rights. It rules by terror. It punishes political opinions. It suppresses free speech. It tolerates no newspapers but its own. It persecutes Christianity with a zeal and a cunning never equalled since the times of the Roman Emperors. It is engaged at this moment in trampling down the peoples of Georgia and executing their leaders by hundreds.

I like to be beholden to the great metropolitan English speech, the sea which receives tributaries from every region under heaven.

He that would be superior to external influences must first become superior to his own passions.