Shaw, George Bernard (1856 – 1950), Irish dramatist & socialist
People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don’t believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and, if they can’t find them, make them.
There is only one religion, though there are a hundred versions of it.
We don’t stop playing because we grow old, we grow old because we stop playing.
Every man over forty is a scoundrel.
Americans adore me and will go on adoring me until I say something nice about them.
An American has no sense of privacy. He does not know what it means. There is no such thing in the country.
The worst sin toward our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them: that’s the essence of inhumanity.
The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one.
Assassination is the extreme form of censorship.
The longer I live the more I see that I am never wrong about anything, and that all the pains I have so humbly taken to verify my notions have only wasted my time.
The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it.
Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh.
Democracy is a device that ensures we shall be governed no better than we deserve.
Democracy substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few.
If all economists were laid end to end, they would not reach a conclusion.
Everything happens to everybody sooner or later if there is time enough.
What is life but a series of inspired follies? The difficulty is to find them to do. Never lose a chance: it doesn’t come every day.
A fashion is nothing but an induced epidemic.
There is no love sincerer than the love of food.
Gambling promises the poor what property performs for the rich – something for nothing.
A lifetime of happiness! No man alive could bear it; it would be hell on earth.
We have no more right to consume happiness without producing it than to consume wealth without producing it.
Hegel was right when he said that we learn from history that man can never learn anything from history.
If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience.
A perpetual holiday is a good working definition of hell.
He who has never hoped can never despair.
The more things a man is ashamed of, the more respectable he is.
When a thing is funny, search it carefully for a hidden truth.
My way of joking is to tell the truth. It is the funniest joke in the world.
When a man wants to murder a tiger he calls it sport; when a tiger wants to murder him he calls it ferocity.
A fool’s brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry.
Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine and at last you create what you will.
A learned man is an idler who kills time with study. Beware of his false knowledge: it is more dangerous than ignorance.
My method is to take the utmost trouble to find the right thing to say, and then to say it with the utmost levity.
The liar’s punishment is not in the least that he is not believed but that he cannot believe anyone else.
Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.
Martyrdom… is the only way in which a man can become famous without ability.
Women upset everything. When you let them into your life, you find that the woman is driving at one thing and you’re driving at another.
A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.
An Englishman thinks he is moral when he is only uncomfortable.
Parentage is a very important profession, but no test of fitness for it is ever imposed in the interest of the children.
Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it.
You’ll never have a quiet world till you knock the patriotism out of the human race.
Do you know what a pessimist is? A man who thinks everybody is as nasty as himself, and hates them for it.
He knows nothing; and he thinks he knows everything. That points clearly to a political career.
You are going to let the fear of poverty govern your life and your reward will be that you will eat, but you will not live.
All professions are conspiracies against the laity.
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
Take care to get what you like or you will be forced to like what you get.
This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap heap; the being a force of Nature instead of a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.
I often quote myself. It adds spice to my conversation.
Silence is the most perfect expression of scorn.
It is dangerous to be sincere unless you are also stupid.
A government that robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.
It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman hate or despise him.
When a stupid man is doing something he is ashamed of, he always declares that it is his duty.
He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches.
I never resist temptation because I have found that things that are bad for me do not tempt me.
Few people think more than two or three times a year; I have made an international reputation for myself by thinking once or twice a week.
There are two tragedies in life. One is not to get your heart’s desire. The other is to get it.
All great truths begin as blasphemies.
The golden rule is that there are no golden rules.
Do not do unto others as you would that they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same.
You see things; and you say, ‘Why?’ But I dream things that never were; and I say, “Why not?”
The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and all time.
Youth is a wonderful thing. What a crime to waste it on children.
Youth, which is forgiven everything, forgives itself nothing: age, which forgives itself everything, is forgiven nothing.
England and America are two countries separated by a common language.
Without art the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable.
Alcohol is a very necessary article… It makes life bearable to millions of people who could not endure their existence if they were quite sober. It enables Parliament to do things at eleven at night that no sane person would do at eleven in the morning.
The English have no respect for their language, and will not teach their children to speak it.
We don’t bother much about dress and manners in England, because as a nation we don’t dress well and we’ve no manners.
If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance.
Beware of the man whose God is in the skies.
Hell is full of musical amateurs: music is the brandy of the damned.
Criminals do not die by the hands of the law. They die by the hands of other men.
Lack of money is the root of all evil.
I can forgive Alfred Nobel for having invented dynamite, but only a fiend in human form could have invented the Nobel Prize.
One man that has a mind and knows it can always beat ten men who haven’t and don’t.
Reading made Don Quixote a gentleman. Believing what he read made him mad.
There are no secrets better kept than the secrets that everybody guesses.
Self-sacrifice enables us to sacrifice other people without blushing.
Do you think that the things people make fools of themselves about are any less real and true than the things they behave sensibly about? They are more true: they are the only things that are true.
If the lesser mind could measure the greater as a footrule can measure a pyramid, there would be finality in universal suffrage. As it is, the political problem remains unsolved.
I am a Millionaire. That is my religion. “Major Barbara (1907), act 2”
The fickleness of the women I love is only equalled by the infernal constancy of the women who love me.
A day’s work is a day’s work, neither more nor less, and the man who does it needs a day’s sustenance, a night’s repose and due leisure, whether he be painter or ploughman.
