Quotes from George Bernard Shaw

Taxes are the chief business of a conqueror of the world.

An author who gives a manager or publisher any rights in his work except those immediately and specifically required for its publication or performance is for business purposes an imbecile.

What Englishman will give his mind to politics as long as he can afford to keep a motor car?

Americans adore me and will go on adoring me until I say something nice about them.

We are the only real aristocracy in the world: the aristocracy of money.

There is only one religion, though there are a hundred versions of it.

Statistics show that of those who contract the habit of eating, very few survive.

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

Christmas is forced upon a reluctant and disgusted nation by the shopkeepers and the press; on its own merits it would wither and shrivel in the fiery breath of universal hatred.

The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.

The English have no respect for their language, and will not teach their children to speak it.

Life is not meant to be easy, my child; but take courage: it can be delightful.

An election is a moral horror, as bad as a battle except for the blood; a mud bath for every soul concerned in it.

The most sublime courage I have ever witnessed has been among that class too poor to know they possessed it, and too humble for the world to discover it.

There is a disease to which plays as well as men become liable with advancing years. In men it is called doting, in plays dating.The more topical the play the more it dates.

There is only one belief that can rob death of its sting and the grave of its victory. For without that you cannot be born again.

Imprisonment is as irrevocable as death.

A serious illness or a death advertises the doctor exactly as a hanging advertises the barrister who defended the person hanged.

Virtue is insufficient temptation.

What is virtue but the Trade Unionism of the married?

Choose silence of all virtues, for by it you hear other men's imperfections, and conceal your own.

The secret of forgiving everything is to understand nothing

Perhaps the greatest social service that can be rendered by anybody to this country and to mankind is to bring up a family.

The only service a friend can really render is to keep up your courage by holding up to you a mirror in which you can see a noble image of yourself.