George Bernard Shaw

Hegel was right when he said that we learn from history that man can never learn anything from history.

If there was nothing wrong in the world there wouldn’t be anything for us to do.

I often quote myself. It adds spice to my conversation.

It is dangerous to be sincere unless you are also stupid.

Reasonable people adapt themselves to the world. Unreasonable people attempt to adapt the world to themselves. All progress, therefore, depends on unreasonable people.

Home life is no more natural to us than a cage is natural to a cockatoo.

When you do the wrong thing, knowing it is wrong, you do so because you haven’t developed the habit of effectively controlling or neutralizing strong inner urges that tempt you, or because you have established the wrong habit and don’t know how to eliminate them effectively.

O imitators, you slavish herd!

The true charm of pedestrianism does not lie in the walking, or in the scenery, but in the talking. The walking is good to time the movement of the tongue by, and to keep the blood and the brain stirred up and active; the scenery and the woodsy smells are good to bear in upon a man an unconscious and unobtrusive charm and solace to eye and soul and sense; but the supreme pleasure comes from the talk.

Every man passes his life in the search after friendship.

Antiquities are history defaced, or some remnants of history which have casually escaped the shipwreck of time.

Since time is the one immaterial object which we cannot influence – neither speed up nor slow down, add to nor diminish – it is an imponderably valuable gift.

Truth often suffers more by the heat of its defenders than the arguments of its opposers.

Fortitude is the marshal of thought, the armor of the will, and the fort of reason.

If I cannot brag of knowing something, then I brag of not knowing it; at any rate, brag.

To be a man’s own fool is bad enough, but the vain man is everybody’s.

We need much less than we think we need.

You must do the thing you think you cannot do.

Wrong does not cease to be wrong because the majority share in it.

If there is any period one would desire to be born in, is it not the age of Revolution; when the old and the new stand side by side, and admit of being compared; when the energies of all men are searched by fear and by hope; when the historic glories of the old can be compensated by the rich possibilities of the new era?

I was exceedingly delighted with the waltz, and also with the polka. These differ in name, but there the difference ceases