George Bernard Shaw

What we want is to see the child in pursuit of knowledge, and not knowledge in pursuit of the child.

Marriage is good enough for the lower classes: they have facilities for desertion that are denied to us.

Forgive him, for he believes that the customs of his tribe are the laws of nature!

Those who talk most about the blessings of marriage and the constancy of its vows are the very people who declare that if the chain were broken and the prisoners left free to choose, the whole social fabric would fly asunder. You cannot have the argument both ways. If the prisoner is happy, why lock him in? If he is not, why pretend that he is?

Treat a friend as a person who may someday become your enemy; an enemy as a person who may someday become your friend.

The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality.

I feel nothing but the accursed happiness I have dreaded all my life long: the happiness that comes as life goes, the happiness of yielding and dreaming instead of resisting and doing, the sweetness of the fruit that is going rotten.

Any man who is not a communist at the age of twenty is a fool. Any man who is still a communist at the age of thirty is an even bigger fool.

There are some experiences in life which should not be demanded twice from any man, and one of them is listening to the Brahms Requiem.

No man can be a pure specialist without being in the strict sense an idiot.

The only way to avoid being miserable is not to have enough leisure to wonder whether you are happy or not.

In your dread of dictators you established a state of society in which every ward boss is a dictator, every private employer a dictator, every financier a dictator, all with the livelihood of the workers at his mercy, and no public responsibility.

If you go to Heaven without being naturally qualified for it you will not enjoy yourself there.

Both optimists and pessimists contribute to society. The optimist invents the aeroplane, the pessimist the parachute.

The right to know is like the right to live. It is fundamental and unconditional in its assumption that knowledge, like life, is a desirable thing.

Don't lose faith. Promise yourself that you will be a success story, and I promise you that all the forces of the universe will unite to come to your aid; you might not feel today or for a while, but the longer you wait the bigger the prize.

We have no more right to consume happiness without producing it than to consume wealth without producing it.

The best bought-up children are those who have seen thier parents as they are. Hypocrisy is not the first duty of a parent.

Alcohol is a very necessary article. It enables Parliament to do things at eleven at night that no sane person would do at eleven in the morning.

In literature the ambition of the novice is to acquire the literary language; the struggle of the adept is to get rid of it.

Audacious ribald: your laughter will finish in hideous boredom before morning.