George Bernard Shaw

Revolutions have never lightened the burden of tyranny: they have only shifted it to another shoulder.

Man is the only animal which esteems itself rich in proportion to the number and voracity of its parasites.

If all the economists were laid end to end, they would not reach a conclusion.

There are no secrets better kept than the secrets that everybody guesses.

A man of my spiritual intensity does not eat corpses.

We don’t stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing.

I found you essay to be good and original. However, the part that was original was not good and the part that was good was not original.

A man’s library is a sort of harem.

No crime is so great as daring to excel.

The spirit of our American radicalism is destructive and aimless; it is not loving; it has no ulterior and divine ends; but is destructive only out of hatred and selfishness.

That was Youth with its reckless exuberance when all things were possible pursued by Age where we are now, looking back at what we destroyed, what we tore away from that self who could do more, and its work that’s become my enemy because that’s what I can tell you about, that Youth who could do anything.

The world is all gates, all opportunities, strings of tension waiting to be struck.

Society is infested by persons who, seeing that the sentiments please, counterfeit the expression of them. These we call sentimentalists – talkers who mistake the description for the thing, saying for having.

See one promontory, one mountain, one sea, one river and see all.

If I had no duties, and no reference to futurity, I would spend my life in driving briskly in a post-chaise with a pretty woman.

Sorrow is a kind of rust of the soul, which every new idea contributes in its passage to scour away. It is the putrefaction of stagnant life, and is remedied by exercise and motion.

A decent provision for the poor is the true test of civilization.

If a man sits down to think, he is immediately asked if has a headache.

Tis God gives skill, but not without men’s hand: He could not make Antonio Stradivarius’s violins without Antonio.

Talent is commonly developed at the expense of character.

If pleasure was not followed by pain, who would forbear it?