George Bernard Shaw

The test of a man or woman's breeding is how they behave in a quarrel.

Without art the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable.

My opportunities were still there nay they multiplied tenfold but the strength and youth to cope with them began to fail and to need eking out with the shifty cunning of experience.

You have learned something. That always feels at first as if you had lost something.

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself.

Those who do not know how to live must make a merit of dying.

The golden rule is that there are no golden rules.

People see a Macbeth film. They imagine they have seen Macbeth, and don't want to see it again; so when your Mr. Hackett or somebody comes round to act the play, he finds the house empty. That is what has happened to dozens of good plays whose authors have allowed them to be filmed. It shall not happen to mine if I can help it.

The solid earth sways like the treacherous sea beneath the feet of men and spirits alike when the innocent are slain in the name of law, and their wrongs are undone by slandering the pure of heart.

Liquor is the chloroform which enables the poor man to endure the painful operation of living.

I finished my first book seventy-six years ago. I offered it to every publisher on the English-speaking earth I had ever heard of. Their refusals were unanimous: and it did not get into print until, fifty years later; publishers would publish anything that had my name on it.

CHARTERIS [unfolding his arms in terror] No, please. Dont. As a philosopher, it__ my business to tell other people the truth; but it__ not their business to tell it to me. I dont like it: it hurts.

But I cant stand saying one thing when everyone knows I mean another. Whats the use in such hypocrisy? If people arrange the world that way for women, theres no good pretending it__ arranged the other way...

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

Well, I've known over thirty men who've found out how to cure consumption. Why do people go on dying of it, Colly? Devilment I suppose!

Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it.

A man's interest in the world is only the overflow from his interest in himself.

Some donkeys have amazing luck.