George Bernard Shaw

Political necessities sometime turn out to be political mistakes.

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

…with the black marble which gives the fireplace the air of a miniature family vault, to suggest early Victorian commercial respectability, belief in money, Bible fetichism, fear of hell always at war with fear of poverty, instinctive horror of the passionate character of art, love and Roman Catholic religion, and all the first fruits of plutocracy in the early generations of the industrial revolution.

Find enough clever things to say, and you’re a Prime Minister; write them down and you’re a Shakespeare.

A nap, my friend, is a brief period of sleep which overtakes superannuated persons when they endeavor to entertain unwelcome visitors or to listen to scientific lectures.

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

When a man is just and firm in his purpose, the citizens burning to approve a wrong or the frowning looks of a tyrant. Do not shake his fixed mind, nor the Southwind. Wild lord of the uneasy Adriatic, nor the thunder in the mighty hand of Jove: Should the heavens crack and tumble down, as the ruins crushed him he would not fear.

There is nothing assured to mortals.

Without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Without innovation, it is a corpse.

Say what you have to say and first time you come to a sentence with a grammatical ending; sit down.

If matters go badly now, they will not always be so.

You are all fundamentalists with a top dressing of science. That is why you are the stupidest of conservatives and reactionists in politics and the most bigoted of obstructionists in science itself. When it comes to getting a move on you are all of the same opinion: stop it, flog it, hang it, dynamite it, stamp it out.

I had rather believe all the Fables in the Legend, and the Talmud, and the Alcoran, than that this universal frame is without a Mind.

Self-confidence is the first requisite to great undertakings.

We like a man to come right out and say what he thinks, if we agree with him.

Europe extends to the Alleghenies; America lies beyond.

If life must not be taken too seriously, then so neither must death.

It is the great privilege of poverty to be happy and yet unenvied, to be healthy with physic, secure without a guard, and to obtain from the bounty of nature what the great and wealthy are compelled to procure by the help of art.

Excessive literary production is a social offense.

How you gonna win if you ain’t right within?

For who is pleased with himself.