George Bernard Shaw

A perpetual holiday is a good working definition of hell.

The only way to avoid being miserable is not to have enough leisure to wonder whether you are happy or not.

All professions are conspiracies against the laity.

All censorships exist to prevent anyone from challenging current conceptions and existing institutions. All progress is initiated by challenging current conceptions, and executed by supplanting existing institutions. Consequently the first condition of progress is the removal of censorships. There is the whole case against censorships in a nutshell.

You have to choose between trusting to the natural stability of gold and the natural stability of the honesty and intelligence of the members of the Government. And, with due respect for these gentlemen, I advise you, as long as the Capitalist system lasts, to vote for gold.

Do not waste your time on Social Questions. What is the matter with the poor is Poverty; what is the matter with the rich is Uselessness.

No great man ever complains of want of opportunity.

It is not true that people are naturally equal for no two people can be together for even a half an hour without one acquiring an evident superiority over the other.

The harder you work, the harder it is to surrender.

Principles aren’t of much account anyway, except at election time. After that you hang them up to let them season.

It’s not the adversity, but how you face it.

A crank is someone with a new idea – until it catches on.

Your own safety is at stake when your neighbor’s house is in flames.

If you can’t forgive and forget, pick one.

Be humble. It becomes a creature, a depending and borrowed being, that lives not of itself, but breathes in another’s air with another’s breath, and is accountable for every moment of time and can call nothing its own, but is absolutely a tenant at will of the great Lord of heaven and earth.

I am not much an advocate for traveling, and I observe that men run away to other countries because they are not good in their own, and run back to their own because they pass for nothing in the new places. For the most part, only the light characters travel. Who are you that have no task to keep you at home?

There must be what Mr. Gladstone many years ago called a blessed act of oblivion. We must all turn our backs upon the horrors of the past. We must look to the future. We cannot afford to drag forward across the years that are to come the hatreds and revenges which have sprung from the injuries of the past.

You don’t get respect if you don’t deserve it

I believe in Michelangelo, Velasquez, and Rembrandt; in the might of design, the mystery of color, the redemption of all things by Beauty everlasting, and the message of Art that has made these hands blessed. Amen. Amen.

The torpid artist seeks inspiration at any cost, by virtue or by vice, by friend or by fiend, by prayer or by wine.

This is the foundation of all. We are not to imagine or suppose, but to discover, what nature does or may be made to do.