George Bernard Shaw

My way of joking is to tell the truth. It is the funniest joke in the world.

If you strike a child, take care that you strike it in anger, even at the risk of maiming it for life. A blow in cold blood neither can nor should be forgiven.

He didn’t dare to, because his father had a weak heart and habitually threatened to drop dead if anybody hurt his feelings. You may have noticed that people with weak hearts are the tyrants of English married life.

The doctor learns that if he gets ahead of the superstitions of his patients he is a ruined man; and the result is that he instinctively takes care not to get ahead of them.

Baseball has the great advantage over cricket of being sooner ended.

The things most people want to know about are usually none of their business.

There comes a time in every rightly constructed boy’s life when he has a raging desire to go somewhere and dig for hidden treasure.

I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude. We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers. A man thinking or working is always alone, let him be where he will. Solitude is not measured by the miles of space that intervene between a man and his fellows.

I do not like work even when someone else does it.

Solvency is maintained by means of a national debt, on the principle, If you will not lend me the money, how can I pay you?

Doubt kills more dreams than failure ever will.

No one can cheat you out of ultimate success but yourself.

Looking? Found someone you have, eh?

If you have only one smile in you give it to the people you love.

Men fear death as children fear to go in the dark; and as that natural fear in children is increased by tales, so is the other.

Beautiful credit! The foundation of modern society. Who shall say that this is not the golden age of mutual trust, of unlimited reliance upon human promises? That is a peculiar condition of society which enables a whole nation to instantly recognize point and meaning in the familiar newspaper anecdote, which puts into the mouth of a distinguished speculator in lands and mines this remark: – I wasn’t worth a cent two years ago, and now I owe two millions of dollars.

In a serious struggle there is no worse cruelty than to be magnanimous at an inopportune time.

It was high counsel that I once heard given to a young person, ‘always do what you are afraid to do.’

The Country is both the Philosopher’s Garden and his Library, in which he Reads and Contemplates the Power, Wisdom and Goodness of God.

It is not given to us to peer into the mysteries of the future. Still, I avow my hope and faith, sure and inviolate, that in the days to come the British and American peoples will for their own safety and for the good of all walk together side by side in majesty, in justice, and in peace.

A man is a god in ruins.