George Bernard Shaw
The idea of personal salvation is intensely repugnant to me when it is not absurd. Imagine Roosevelt, the big brute, preserving his personality in a future state and swaggering about as a celestial Rough Rider!
I am a Christian. That obliges me to be a Communist.
Those who do not know how to live must make a merit of dying.
Virtue consists, not in abstaining from vice, but in not desiring it.
If you leave the smallest corner of your head vacant for a moment, other people's opinions will rush in from all quarters.
A perpetual holiday is a good working definition of hell.
The man with a toothache thinks everyone happy whose teeth are sound. The poverty-stricken man makes the same mistake about the rich man.
The Old Testament God is a person with body parts and passions. The Church of England God has neither body, parts nor passions, and is therefore not a person.
If there was nothing wrong in the world there wouldn't be anything for us to do.
Life contains but two tragedies. One is not to get your heart's desire; the other is to get it.
General consultant to mankind.
Which painting in the National Gallery would I save if there was a fire? The one nearest the door of course.
A man who has no office to go, to I don't care who he is, is a trial of which you can have no conception.
It is most unwise for people in love to marry.
We must always think about things, and we must think about things as they are, not as they are said to be.
Every person who has mastered a profession is a skeptic concerning it.
The only fundamental and possible socialism is the socialisation of the selective breeding of man.
A fashion is nothing but an induced epidemic.
A broken heart is a very pleasant complaint for a man in London if he has a comfortable income.
Political necessities sometime turn out to be political mistakes.
It's so hard to know what to do when one wishes earnestly to do right.
What is the use of writing plays, what is the use of writing anything, if there is not a will which finally moulds chaos itself into a race of gods.
If I were a woman, I'd simply refuse to speak to any man or do anything for men until I'd got the vote.
Cruelty would be delicious if one could only find some sort of cruelty that didn't really hurt.
Creation is a miracle of daily recurrence. 'A miracle a minute' would not be a bad slogan for God.
Find enough clever things to say, and you're a Prime Minister; write them down and you're a Shakespeare.
Men have to do some awfully mean things to keep up their respectability.
If a woman can, by careful selection of a father and nourishment of herself, produce a citizen with efficient senses, sound organs and a good digestion, she should clearly be secured a sufficient reward for that natural service to make her willing to undertake and repeat it.
I have a strong feeling that I shall be glad when I am dead and done for - scrapped at last to make room for somebody better, cleverer, more perfect than myself.
The faults of the burglar are the qualities of the financier.
Why, except as a means of livelihood, a man should desire to act on the stage when he has the whole world to act in, is not clear to me.
All my life affection has been showered upon me, and every forward step I have made has been taken in spite of it.
Americans adore me and will go on adoring me until I say something nice about them.
The natural term of the affection of the human animal for its offspring is six years.
What is virtue but the Trade Unionism of the married?
The heretic is always better dead. And mortal eyes cannot distinguish the saint from the heretic.
We are the only real aristocracy in the world: the aristocracy of money.
I want to destroy ownership in order that possession and enjoyment may be raised to the highest point in every section of the community.
My method of getting a play across the footlights is like a revolver shooting: every line has a bullet in it and comes with an explosion.
We don't stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing.
Democracy is a device that ensures we shall be governed no better than we deserve.
You see things; and you say 'Why?' But I dream things that never were; and I say 'Why not?'
The worst sin toward our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them: that's the essence of inhumanity.
Take care to get what you like or you will be forced to like what you get.
The liar's punishment is not in the least that he is not believed, but that he cannot believe anyone else.
Silence is the most perfect expression of scorn.
A gentleman is one who puts more into the world than he takes out.
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 nothing more dangerous than the conscience of a bigot.