George Bernard Shaw

Cruelty would be delicious if one could only find some sort of cruelty that didn__ really hurt.

If an imaginative boy has a sufficiently rich mother who has intelligence, personal grace, dignity of character without harshness, and a cultivated sense of the best art of her time to enable her to make her house beautiful, she sets a standard for him against which very few women can struggle, besides effecting for him a disengagement of his affections, his sense of beauty, and his idealism from his specifically sexual impulses.

There are two tragedies in life. One is to lose your heart's desire. The other is to gain it.

All censorships exist to prevent anyone from challenging current conceptions and existing institutions. All progress is initiated by challenging current conceptions, and executed by supplanting existing institutions. Consequently, the first condition of progress is the removal of censorship.

[Man] progresses in all things by resolutely making a fool of himself.

A man learns to skate by staggering about and making a fool of himself. Indeed he progresses in all things by resolutely making a fool of himself.

Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.

The longer I live the more I see that I am never wrong about anything, and that all the pains I have so humbly taken to verify my notions have only wasted my time.

You may remember that on earth__hough of course we never confessed it__he death of anyone we knew, even those we liked best, was always mingled with a certain satisfaction at being finally done with them.

HIGGINS. The great secret, Eliza, is not having bad manners or good manners or any other particular sort of manners, but having the same manner for all human souls: in short, behaving as if were in Heaven, where there are no third-class carriages, and one soul is as good as another.

While we ourselves are the living graves of murdered beasts, how can we expect any ideal conditions on this earth?

If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas.

The quality of a play is the quality of its ideas.

I never asked to be a king: it was pushed on me. So if you are going to say 'Son of St Louis: gird on the sword of your ancestors, and lead us to victory' you may spare your breath to cool your porridge; for I cannot do it. I am not built that way; and there is an end of it.

Written over the gate here are the words 'Leave every hope behind, ye who enter.' Only think what a relief that is! For what is hope? A form of moral responsibility. Here there is no hope, and consequently no duty, no work, nothing to be gained by praying, nothing to be lost by doing what you like. Hell, in short is a place where you have nothing to do but amuse yourself.

The most distinguished persons become more revolutionary as they grow older.

Democracy is a device that ensures we shall be governed no better than we deserve.

Criminals do not die by the hands of the law. They die by the hands of other men.