George Bernard Shaw
Socialism, reduced to its simplest legal and practical expression, means the complete discarding of the institution of private property by transforming it into public property, and the division of the resultant public income equally and indiscriminately among the entire population.Collection: Legal
I never thought much of the courage of a lion tamer. Inside the cage he is at least safe from people.Collection: Courage
If all the economists were laid end to end, they'd never reach a conclusion.Collection: Finance
The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it.Collection: Power
Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all others because you were born in it.Collection: Patriotism
We learn from experience that men never learn anything from experience.Collection: Men
Parentage is a very important profession, but no test of fitness for it is ever imposed in the interest of the children.Collection: Parenting
The fickleness of the women I love is only equalled by the infernal constancy of the women who love me.Collection: Women
Marriage is good enough for the lower classes: they have facilities for desertion that are denied to us.Collection: Marriage
Animals are my friends... and I don't eat my friends.Collection: Food
The best place to find God is in a garden. You can dig for him there.Collection: Gardening
Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.Collection: Men
Never fret for an only son, the idea of failure will never occur to him.Collection: Failure
Marriage is an alliance entered into by a man who can't sleep with the window shut, and a woman who can't sleep with the window open.Collection: Anniversary
There is only one religion, though there are a hundred versions of it.Collection: Religion
Beauty is all very well at first sight; but who ever looks at it when it has been in the house three days?Collection: Beauty
There is no subject on which more dangerous nonsense is talked and thought than marriage.Collection: Marriage
If you're not producing as much as you consume, or perhaps a little more, then clearly we cannot use the big organization of our society for the purpose of keeping you alive, because your life does not benefit us, and it can't be of very much use to yourself.Collection: Society
There is no sincerer love than the love of food.Collection: Food
If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance.Collection: Funny
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.Collection: Happiness
The great advantage of a hotel is that it is a refuge from home life.Collection: Great
It is the mark of a truly intelligent person to be moved by statistics.Collection: Intelligence
Give a man health and a course to steer, and he'll never stop to trouble about whether he's happy or not.Collection: Health
The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.Collection: Communication
Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine and at last you create what you will.Collection: Imagination
If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience.Collection: Experience
Very few people can afford to be poor.Collection: Money
Only on paper has humanity yet achieved glory, beauty, truth, knowledge, virtue, and abiding love.Collection: Beauty
The British soldier can stand up to anything except the British War Office.Collection: War
Statistics show that of those who contract the habit of eating, very few survive.Collection: Food
Youth is wasted on the young.Collection: Age
Power does not corrupt men; fools, however, if they get into a position of power, corrupt power.Collection: Power
Men are wise in proportion, not to their experience, but to their capacity for experience.Collection: Experience
Clever and attractive women do not want to vote; they are willing to let men govern as long as they govern men.Collection: Women
Life levels all men. Death reveals the eminent.Collection: Death
Beware of false knowledge; it is more dangerous than ignorance.Collection: Wisdom
Love is a gross exaggeration of the difference between one person and everybody else.Collection: Love
The truth is, hardly any of us have ethical energy enough for more than one really inflexible point of honor.Collection: Truth
We are made wise not by the recollection of our past, but by the responsibility for our future.Collection: Wisdom
Without art, the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable.Collection: Art
Independence? That's middle class blasphemy. We are all dependent on one another, every soul of us on earth.Collection: Independence
Everything happens to everybody sooner or later if there is time enough.Collection: Time
If I own a large part of Scotland, I can turn the people off the land practically into the sea or across the sea. I can take women in child-bearing and throw them into the snow and leave them there. That has been done. I can do it for no better reason than I think it is better to shoot deer on the land than allow people to live on it.Collection: Women
Peace is not only better than war, but infinitely more arduous.Collection: Peace
Science never solves a problem without creating ten more.Collection: Science
Perhaps the greatest social service that can be rendered by anybody to the country and to mankind is to bring up a family.Collection: Family
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.Collection: Society
What Englishman will give his mind to politics as long as he can afford to keep a motor car?Collection: Car
Except during the nine months before he draws his first breath, no man manages his affairs as well as a tree does.Collection: Nature