George Bernard Shaw

Why should we take advice on sex from the pope? If he knows anything about it, he shouldn’t!

The only way for a woman to provide for herself decently is for her to be good to some man that can afford to be good to her.

It is a curious sensation: the sort of pain that goes mercifully beyond our powers of feeling. When your heart is broken, your boats are burned: nothing matters any more. It is the end of happiness and the beginning of peace.

Independence? That’s middle class blasphemy. We are all dependent on one another, every soul of us on earth.

You don’t learn to hold your own in the world by standing on guard, but by attacking and getting well hammered yourself.

Most people do not pray; they only beg.

For disappointments, that come not by our own folly, they are the trials or corrections of Heaven: and it is our own fault, if they prove not our advantage.

Religion is as effectually destroyed by bigotry as by indifference.

One of the first businesses of a sensible man is to know when he is beaten, and to leave off fighting at once.

Our country is that spot to which our heart is bound.

Men cease to interest us when we find their limitations.

There are no conditions to which a person cannot grow accustomed, especially if he sees that everyone around him lives in the same way.

There are several good protections against temptation, but the surest is cowardice.

Your mind makes a cruel master, but a generous servant.

In the first place, God made idiots. That was for practice. Then he made school boards.

He took off his hat and shook it (having hurried home as though his own coronation were waiting), and moved now with the slow deliberation of lonely people who have time for every meager requirement of their lives.

No member of society has the right to teach any doctrine contrary to what society holds to be true.

Few of us have vitality enough to make any of our instincts imperious.

Knowledge always demands increase; it is like fire, which must first be kindled by some external agent, but will afterwards always propagate itself.

Men’s men: gentle or simple, they’re much of a muchness.

Some look at things that are, and ask why. I dream of things that never were and ask why not?