George Bernard Shaw

It took me 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.

What is wrong with priests and popes is that instead of being apostles and saints, they are nothing but empirics who say I know instead of I am learning, and pray for credulity and inertia as wise men pray for skepticism and activity.

My reputation grows with every failure.

When it comes to the point, really bad men are just as rare as really good ones.

You can always tell an old soldier by the inside of his holsters and cartridge boxes. The young ones carry pistols and cartridges; the old ones, grub.

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.

Let us make a special effort to stop communicating with each other, so we can have some conversation.

When we are through, we shall have reproduced American life as lived; and that, I think is the best way of preserving at least a part of our history and tradition.

I am become death, shatterer of worlds.

Once you discover that you can, then you must.

To be good is not enough; a man must be good for something.

Awareness without action is worthless.

Punctuality is the virtue of the bored.

If we admit that human life can be ruled by reason, then all possibility of life is destroyed.

Wealth is the product of a man’s ability to think.

A new breeze is blowing, and a world refreshed by freedom seems reborn; for in man’s heart, if not in fact, the day of the dictator is over. The totalitarian era is passing, its old ideas blown away like leaves from an ancient, lifeless tree.

I have 100 percent Bronx pride like it’s a country like I AM the Bronx.

The best leaders are those most interested in surrounding themselves with assistants and associates smarter than they are. They are frank in admitting this and are willing to pay for such talents.

Some life lessons don’t ever change. But how you embrace them will distinguish you from the pack.

Know your goal, make a plan and pull the trigger.

When a thought is too weak to be expressed simply, simply drop it.