George Bernard Shaw

Whenever you wish to do anything against the law, Cicely, always consult a good solicitor first.
George Bernard Shaw

Better keep yourself clean and bright; you are the window through which you must see the world.
George Bernard Shaw

Forgive him, for he believes that the customs of his tribe are the laws of nature!
George Bernard Shaw

If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience!
George Bernard Shaw

It has taken me nearly twenty years of studied self-restraint, aided by the natural decay of my faculties, to make myself dull enough to be accepted as a serious person by the British public; and I am not sure that I am not still regarded as a suspicious character in some quarters.
George Bernard Shaw

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.
George Bernard Shaw

We are all dependent on one another, every soul of us on earth.
George Bernard Shaw

Physically there is nothing to distinguish human society from the farm-yard except that children are more troublesome and costly than chickens and calves and that men and women are not so completely enslaved as farm stock.
George Bernard Shaw

We are made wise not by the recollection of our past, but by the responsibility for our future.
George Bernard Shaw

We mustn't be stiff and stand-off, you know. We must be thoroughly democratic, and patronize everybody without distinction of class.
George Bernard Shaw

You must not suppose, because I am a man of letters, that I never tried to earn an honest living.
George Bernard Shaw

I often quote myself. It adds spice to my conversation.
George Bernard Shaw

It is difficult, if not impossible, for most people to think otherwise than in the fashion of their own period.
George Bernard Shaw

The greatest evils and the worst of crimes is poverty; our first duty, a duty to which every other consideration should be sacrificed, is not to be poor.
George Bernard Shaw

The universal regard for money is the one hopeful fact in our civilization. Money is the most important thing in the world. It represents health, strength, honor, generosity and beauty. Not the least of its virtues is that it destroys base people as certainly as it fortifies and dignifies noble people.
George Bernard Shaw

Youth is such a wonderful thing. What a crime to waste it on children.
George Bernard Shaw

Youth, which is forgiven everything, forgives itself nothing: age, which forgives itself everything, is forgiven nothing.
George Bernard Shaw

Between persons of equal income there is no social distinction except the distinction of merit. Money is nothing: character, conduct, and capacity are everything. There would be great people and ordinary people and little people, but the great would always be those who had done great things, and never the idiots whose mothers had spoiled them and whose fathers had left them a hundred thousand a year; and the little would be persons of small minds and mean characters, and not poor persons who had never had a chance. That is why idiots are always in favor of inequality of income (their only chance of eminence), and the really great in favor of equality.
George Bernard Shaw

Democracy substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few.
George Bernard Shaw

Everything happens to everybody sooner or later if there is time enough.
George Bernard Shaw

I never thought much of the courage of a lion tamer. Inside the cage he is at least safe from people.
George Bernard Shaw

If all the economists were laid end to end, they'd never reach a conclusion.
George Bernard Shaw

It is all that the young can do for the old, to shock them and keep them up to date.
George Bernard Shaw

Money is indeed the most important thing in the world; and all sound and successful personal and national morality should have this fact for its basis.
George Bernard Shaw

The seven deadly sins... food, clothing, firing, rent, taxes, respectability and children. Nothing can lift those seven millstones from Man's neck but money; and the spirit cannot soar until the millstones are lifted.
George Bernard Shaw

This comes of James teaching me to think for myself, and never to hold back out of fear of what other people may think of me. It works beautifully as long as I think the same things as he does.
George Bernard Shaw

He knows nothing; and he thinks he knows everything. That points clearly to a political career.
George Bernard Shaw

If women were particular about men's characters, they would never get married at all.
George Bernard Shaw

In literature the ambition of the novice is to acquire the literary language: the struggle of the adept is to get rid of it.
George Bernard Shaw

Men are wise in proportion, not to their experience, but to their capacity for experience.
George Bernard Shaw

Morality is suspecting other people of not being legally married.
George Bernard Shaw

We know there is intention and purpose in the universe, because there is intention and purpose in us.
George Bernard Shaw

A veteran journalist has never had time to think twice before he writes.
George Bernard Shaw

He knows nothing and thinks he knows everything. That points clearly to a political career.
George Bernard Shaw

In a battle all you need to make you fight is a little hot blood and the knowledge that it's more dangerous to lose than to win.
George Bernard Shaw

Virtue consists, not in abstaining from vice, but in not desiring it.
George Bernard Shaw

Except during the nine months before he draws his first breath, no man manages his affairs as well as a tree does.
George Bernard Shaw

Hell is full of musical amateurs.
George Bernard Shaw

The English have no respect for their language, and will not teach their children to speak it.
George Bernard Shaw

Fashions, after all, are only induced epidemics.
George Bernard Shaw

If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience.
George Bernard Shaw

To me the sole hope of human salvation lies in teaching Man to regard himself as an experiment in the realization of God, to regard his hands as God's hand, his brain as God's brain, his purpose as God's purpose. He must regard God as a helpless Longing, which longed him into existence by its desperate need for an executive organ.
George Bernard Shaw

When a man says money can do anything, that settles it: he hasn't got any.
George Bernard Shaw

An asylum for the sane would be empty in America.
George Bernard Shaw

Better never than late.
George Bernard Shaw

She had lost the art of conversation but not, unfortunately, the power of speech.
George Bernard Shaw

The fickleness of the women I love is only equalled by the infernal constancy of the women who love me.
George Bernard Shaw

The heretic is always better dead. And mortal eyes cannot distinguish the saint from the heretic.
George Bernard Shaw

The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who haven't got it.
George Bernard Shaw

The secret of forgiving everything is to understand nothing.
George Bernard Shaw