George Bernard Shaw

We cut the throat of a calf and hang it up by the heels to bleed to death so that our veal cutlet may be white; we nail geese to a board and cram them with food because we like the taste of liver disease; we tear birds to pieces to decorate our women's hats; we mutilate domestic animals for no reason at all except to follow an instinctively cruel fashion; and we connive at the most abominable tortures in the hope of discovering some magical cure for our own diseases by them.

What is the matter with universities is that the students are school children, whereas it is of the very essence of university education that they should be adults.

The secret of being miserable is to have leisure to bother about whether you are happy or not. The cure for it is occupation, because occupation means pre-occupation; and the pre-occupied person is neither happy nor unhappy, but simply alive and active. That is why it is necessary to happiness that one should be tired.

You cannot have power for good without having power for evil too. Even mother's milk nourishes murderers as well as heroes.

Do you think that the things people make fools of themselves about are any less real and true than the things they behave sensibly about? They are more true: they are the only things that are true.

I like flowers, I also like children, but I do not chop their heads off and keep them in bowls of water around the house.

I don't know if there are men on the moon, but if there are they must be using the earth as their lunatic asylum

When you loved me I gave you the whole sun and stars to play with. I gave you eternity in a single moment, strength of the mountains in one clasp of your arms, and the volume of all the seas in one impulse of your soul.

It is not pleasure that makes life worth living. It is life that makes pleasure worth having.

The confusing of marriage with morality has done more to destroy the conscience of the human race than any other single error.

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

The word morality, if we met it in the Bible, would surprise us as much as the word telephone or motor car.

War does not decide who is right but who is left.

Martyrdom, sir, is what these people like: it is the only way in which a man can become famous without ability.

[Chess] is a foolish expedient for making idle people believe they are doing something very clever, when they are only wasting their time.

My method is to take the utmost trouble to find the right thing to say, and then to say it with the utmost levity.

When a thing is funny, search it carefully for a hidden truth.

The plain working truth is that it is not only good for people to be shocked occasionally, but absolutely necessary to the progress of society that they should be shocked pretty often.

Shall I turn up the light for you? No, give me deeper darkness. Money is not made in the light.