George Bernard Shaw

The world is populated in the main by people who should not exist.

The secret of forgiving everything is to understand nothing.

Why should we take advice on sex from the pope? If he knows anything about it, he shouldn’t!

Lack of money is the root of all evil.

Peace is not only better than war, but infinitely more arduous.

Englishmen hate Liberty and Equality too much to understand them. But every Englishman loves a pedigree.

Paradise Lost is a book that, once put down, is very hard to pick up again.

All I say is, kings is kings, and you got to make allowances. Take them all around, they’re a mighty ornery lot. It’s the way they’re raised.

I think I have a good deal of my Uncle Theodore in me, because I could not, at any age, be content to take my place by the fireside and simply look on.

We are wiser than we know.

What is there that confers the noblest delight? What is that which swells a man’s breast with pride above that which any other experience can bring to him? Discovery! To know that you are walking where none others have walked; that you are beholding what human eye has not seen before; that you are breathing a virgin atmosphere. To give birth to an idea, to discover a great thought – an intellectual nugget, right under the dust of a field that many a brain-plough had gone over before. To find a new planet, to invent a new hinge, to find a way to make the lightning carry your messages. To be the first – that is the idea.

To see helpless infancy stretching out her hands, and pouring out her cries in testimony of dependence, without any powers to alarm jealousy, or any guilt to alienate affection, must surely awaken tenderness in every human mind; and tenderness once excited will be hourly increased by the natural contagion of felicity, by the repercussion of communicated pleasure, by the consciousness of dignity of benefaction.

The first half of life consists of the capacity to enjoy without the chance; the last half consists of the chance without the capacity.

Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth.

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

I would rather have my ignorance than another man’s knowledge, because I have so much of it.

A heart well prepared for adversity in bad times hopes, and in good times fears for a change in fortune.

If you have knowledge, let others light their candles with it.

The whole history of the world is summed up in the fact that, when nations are strong, they are not always just, and when they wish to be just, they are no longer strong.

Genius at first is little more than a great capacity for receiving discipline.

Love is the only force capable of transforming an enemy into a friend.