Quotes from George Bernard Shaw

The heretic is always better dead. And mortal eyes cannot distinguish the saint from the heretic.

No man fully capable of his own language ever masters another.

The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and about all time.

You don't learn to hold your own by standing on guard, but by attacking, and getting well hammered yourself.

Morality is not respectability.

A man never tells you anything until you contradict him.

A day's work is a day's work, neither more nor less, and the man who does it needs a day's sustenance, a night's repose and due leisure, whether he be painter or ploughman.

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

Our laws make law impossible; our liberties destroy all freedom; our property is organized robbery; our morality an impudent hypocrisy; our wisdom is administered by inexperienced or mal-experienced dupes; our power wielded by cowards and weaklings; and our honour false in all its points. I am an enemy of the existing order for good reasons.

The man with a toothache thinks everyone happy whose teeth are sound. The poverty-stricken man makes the same mistake about the rich man.

Parentage is a very important profession, but no test of fitness, for it is ever imposed in the interests of the Children.

The best brought-up children are those who have seen their parents as they are. Hypocrisy is not the parents' first duty.

A pessimist? A man who thinks everybody as nasty as himself, and hates them for it.

He knows nothing; he thinks he knows everything - that clearly points to a political career.

Modern poverty is not the poverty that was blest in the Sermon on the Mount.

What really flatters a man is that you think him worth flattery.

While we have prisons it matters little which of us occupy the cells.

A great devotee of the gospel of getting on.

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends upon the unreasonable man.

Reformers have the idea that change can be achieved by brute sanity.

If you go to heaven without being naturally qualified for it, you will not enjoy it there.

Reminiscences make one feel so deliciously aged and sad.

Self-control is the quality that distinguishes the fittest to survive.

People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. The people who get on in this world are they who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and, if they can't find them, make them.