George Bernard Shaw

This is the true joy in life: Being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one, being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances, complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community and as long as I live, it is my privilege to do for it what I can. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for the moment and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.

You have set up in New York Harbor a monstrous idol which you call Liberty. The only thing that remains to complete that monument is to put on its pedestal the inscription written by Dante on the gate of hell: All hope abandon ye who enter here.

Patriotism is a pernicious, psychopathic form of idiocy.

Animals are my friends… and I don’t eat my friends.

No man who is occupied in doing a very difficult thing, and doing it very well, ever loses his self-respect.

The secret of forgiving everything is to understand nothing.

We are taught by great actions that the universe is the property of every individual in it.

That old law about ‘an eye for an eye’ leaves everybody blind. The time is always right to do what is right.

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….

Good poetry seems too simple and natural a thing that when we meet it we wonder that all men are not always poets. Poetry is nothing but healthy speech.

I decided that it was not wisdom that enabled poets to write their poetry, but a kind of instinct or inspiration, such as you find in seers and prophets who deliver all their sublime messages without knowing in the least what they mean.

There are nine hundred and ninety-nine patrons of virtue to one virtuous man.

We are stripped bare by the curse of plenty.

Reading maketh a full man; and writing an axact man. And, therefore, if a man write little, he need have a present wit; and if he read little, he need have much cunning to seem to know which he does not.

Knowledge is more than equivalent to force.

There is much pain that is quite noiseless; and vibrations that make human agonies are often a mere whisper in the roar of hurrying existence. There are glances of hatred that stab and raise no cry of murder; robberies that leave man or woman for ever beggared of peace and joy, yet kept secret by the sufferer –committed to no sound except that of low moans in the night, seen in no writing except that made on the face by the slow months of suppressed anguish and early morning tears. Many an inherited sorrow that has marred a life has been breathed into no human ear.

Subordination tends greatly to human happiness. Were we all upon an equality, we should have no other enjoyment than mere animal pleasure.

A man’s style is his mind’s voice. Wooden minds, wooden voices.

Martyrdom covers a multitude of sins.

Only kings, presidents, editors, and people with tapeworms have the right to use the editorial “we.”

Out of Plato come all things that are still written and debated about among men of thought.