George Bernard Shaw

Happiness and beauty are by-products. Folly is the direct pursuit of happiness and beauty.

An Englishman does everything on principle: he fights you on patriotic principles; he robs you on business principles; he enslaves you on imperial principles.

Every Englishman believes that Handel now occupies an important position in heaven. If so, le bon Dieu must feel toward him very much as Louis Treize felt toward Richelieu.

What we are confronted with now is a growing perception that if we desire a certain type of civilization and culture we must exterminate the sort of people who do not fit into it.

Remember that I too am mortal.

It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman hate or despise him.

My own education has been entirely controversial: that is why I know what I am writing about; and appear eccentric to dogmatically educated Old School Ties whose heads are stuffed with obsolete shibboleths.

If you injure your neighbour, better not do it by halves.

Schools and schoolmasters, as we have them today, are not popular as places of education and teachers, but rather prisons and turnkeys in which children are kept to prevent them disturbing and chaperoning their parent.

When Satan makes impure verses, Allah sends a divine tune to cleanse them.

Instruction in sex is as important as instruction in food; yet not only are our adolescents not taught the physiology of sex, but never warned that the strongest sexual attraction may exist between persons so incompatible in tastes and capacities that they could not endure living together for a week much less a lifetime.

Gambling promises the poor what property performs for the rich-something for nothing.

Life on board a pleasure steamer violates every moral and physical condition of healthy life except fresh air. . . . It is a guzzling, lounging, gambling, dog's life. The only alternative to excitement is irritability.

Being a mother means that your heart is no longer yours; it wanders wherever your children do

Christianity might be a good thing if anyone ever tried it.

The whole strength of England lies in the fact that the enormous majority of the English people are snobs.

People must not be forced to adopt me as their favourite author, even for their own good.

My religion? Well, my dear, I am a Millionaire. That is my religion.

It is easy - terribly easy - to shake a man's faith in himself. To take advantage of that to break a man's spirit is devil's work.

The art of government is the organization of idolatry. The bureaucracy consists of functionaries; the aristocracy, of idols; the democracy, of idolaters. The populace cannot understand the bureaucracy: it can only worship the national idols.

If women were as fastidious as men, morally or physically, there would be an end of the race.