George Bernard Shaw

When a heretic wishes to avoid martyrdom he speaks of “Orthodoxy, True and False” and demonstrates that the True is his heresy.

My way of joking is to tell the truth. It's the funniest joke in the world.

The great advantage of a hotel is that it's a refuge from home life.

They have accepted the burden of eternal life. They have taken the agony from birth; and their life does not fail them even in the hour of their destruction.

I say, let them dread, of all things, stagnation; for from the moment I, Lilith, lose hope and faith in them, they are doomed. In that hope and faith I have let them live for a moment; and in that moment I have spared them many times. But mightier creatures than they have killed hope and faith, and perished from the earth; and I may not spare them for ever. I am Lilith: I brought life into the whirlpool of force, and compelled my enemy, Matter, to obey a living soul. But in enslaving Life's enemy I made him Life's master; for that is the end of all slavery; and now I shall see the slave set free and the enemy reconciled, the whirlpool become all life and no matter. And because these infants that call themselves ancients are reaching out towards that, I will have patience with them still; though I know well that when they attain it they shall become one with me and supersede me, and Lilith will be only a legend and a lay that has lost its meaning. Of Life only is there no end; and though of its million starry mansions many are empty and many still unbuilt, and though its vast domain is as yet unbearably desert, my seed shall one day fill it and master its matter to its uttermost confines. And for what may be beyond, the eyesight of Lilith is too short. It is enough that there is a beyond.

The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them: that's the essence of inhumanity.

You cannot have power for good without having power for evil too. Even mother's milk nourishes murderers as well as heroes.

The only time my education was interrupted was when I was in school.

Hail, Sphinx: salutation from Julius Caesar! I have wandered in many lands, seeking the lost regions from which my birth into this world exiled me, and the company of creatures such as I myself. I have found flocks and pastures, men and cities, but no other Caesar, no air native to me, no man kindred to me, none who can do my day's deed, and think my night's thought.

Obedience simulates subordination as fear of the police simulates honesty.

Pasteboard pies and paper flowers are being banished from the stage by the growth of that power of accurate observation which is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it…

God help England if she had no Scots to think for her!

The reformer for whom the world is not good enough finds himself shoulder to shoulder with him that is not good enough for the world.

It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman hate or despise him.

The man with a toothache thinks everyone happy whose teeth are sound. The poverty stricken man makes the same mistake about the rich man.

There are no perfectly honorable men; but every true man has one main point of honor and a few minor ones.

You are so careful of your boy's morals, knowing how troublesome they may be, that you keep him away from the Venus of Milo only to find him in the arms of the scullery maid or someone much worse. You decide that the Hermes of Praxiteles and Wagner's Tristan are not suited for young girls; and your daughter marries somebody appallingly unlike either Hermes or Tristan solely to escape from your parental protection. You have not stifled a single passion nor averted a single danger: you have depraved the passions by starving them, and broken down all the defences which so effectively protect children brought up in freedom.

An American has no sense of privacy. He does not know what it means. There is no such thing in the country.

Self-denial is not a virtue: it is only the effect of prudence on rascality.

Martyrdom, sir, is what these people like: it is the only way in which a man can become famous without ability.