George Bernard Shaw

“She has mischievious moments when she wishes she could get him alone on a desert island...”

“The perfect love affair is one which is conducted entirely by post.”

“A fashion is nothing but an induced epidemic.”

“When you vote, you only change the names of the cabinet. When you shoot, you pull down governments, inaugurate new epochs, abolish old orders and set up new.”

“There is only one religion, though there are a hundred versions of it.”

“Take care to get what you like or you will be forced to like what you get.”

“Imitation is not just the sincerest form of flattery - it's the sincerest form of learning.”

“What we want to see is the child in pursuit of the knowledge not the knowledge in pursuit of the child.”

“Bear it like a man, even if you feel it like an ass. ”

“Most people go to their grave with their music inside them.”

“The truth sticks in our throats with all the sauces it is served with: it will never go down until we take it without any sauce at all.”

“Lack of money is the root of all evil.”

“BRITANNUS (shocked).Caesar: this is not proper.THEODOTUS (outraged).How!CAESAR (recovering his self-possession).Pardon him. Theodotus: he is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature.”

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

“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”

“HIGGINSI find that the moment I let a woman make friends with me, she becomes jealous, exacting, suspicious, and a damned nuisance. I find that the moment I let myself make friends with a woman, I become selfish and tyrannical. Women upset everything. When you let them into your life, you find that the woman is driving at one thing and you're driving at another.PICKERINGAt what, for example?HIGGINSOh, Lord knows! I suppose the woman wants to live her own life; and the man wants to live his; and each tries to drag the other on to the wrong track. One wants to go north and the other south; and the result is that both have to go east, though they both hate the east wind.”

“The best way to get your point across is to entertain.”

“The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.”

“The risks of liberty we must let everyone take; but the risks of ignorance and self-helplessness are another matter.”

“But whether the risks to which liberty exposes us are moral or physical our right to liberty involves the right to run them. A man who is not free to risk his neck as an aviator or his soul as a heretic is not free at all; and the right to liberty begins, not at the age of 21 years but 21 seconds.”

“Men are wise in proportion, not to their experience, but to their capacity for experience.”

“First love is only a little foolishness and a lot of curiosity.”

“There are no secrets better kept than the secrets that everybody guesses.”

“What you are to do without me I cannot imagine.”

“You know well I couldn't bear to live with a low common man after you two; and it's wicked and cruel of you to insult me by pretending I could.”

“The man with toothache thinks everyone happy whose teeth are sound. The poverty stricken man makes the same mistake about the rich man.”

“That is the injustice of a woman's lot. A woman has to bring up her children; and that means to restrain them, to deny them things they want, to set them tasks, to punish them when they do wrong, to do all the unpleasant things. And then the father, who has nothing to do but pet them and spoil them, comes in when all her work is done and stealstheir affection from her.”

“I choose not to make a graveyard of my body for the rotting corpses of dead animals.”

“A pessimist is a man who thinks everybody is as nasty as himself, and hates them for it.”

“The fickleness of the women I love is only equaled by the infernal constancy of the women who love me.”

“Oh that. Men do fall in love with me. They seem to think me a creature with volcanic passions; I'm sure I don't know why. All the volcanic women I know are plain little creatures with sandy hair. I don't consider human volcanoes respectable. And I'm so tired of the subject. Our house is always full of women in love with my husband and men in love with me. We encourage it because it's pleasant to have company.”

“I like a bit of mongrel myself, whether it's a man or a dog.”

“The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it.”

“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 a curious sensation: the sort of pain that goes mercifully beyond our powers of feeling. When your heart is broken, your boats are burned: nothing matters any more. It is the end of happiness and the beginning of peace.”

“...a man of great common sense and good taste, meaning thereby a man without originality or moral courage.”

“The world shown us in books, whether the books be confessed epics or professed gospels, or in codes, or in political orations, or in philosophic systems, is not the main world at all: it is only the self-consciousness of certain abnormal people who have the specific artistic talent and temperament. A serious matter this for you and me, because the man whose consciousness does not correspond to that of the majority is a madman; and the old habit of worshipping madmen is giving way to the new habit of locking them up. And since what we call education and culture is for the most part nothing but the substitution of reading for experience, of literature for life, of the absolete fictitious for the contemporary real, education, as you no doubt observed at Oxford, destroys, by supplantation, every mind that is not strong enough to see through the imposture and to use the great Masters of Arts as what they really are and no more: that is, patentees of highly questionable methods of thinking, and manufacturers of highly questionable, and for the majority but half valid representations of life. The school boy who uses his Homer to throw at his fellow's head makes perhaps the safest and most rational use of him; and I observe with reassurance that you occasionally do the same, in your prime, with your Aristotle.”

“Човешките същества са единствените животни, от които аз съм напълно и истински уплашен.”

“Set me anything to do as a task, and it is inconceivable the desire I have to do something else.”

“There is always danger for those who are afraid.”

“Independence? That's middle class blasphemy. We are all dependent on one another, every soul of us on earth.”

“The schoolmaster is the person who takes the children off the parents' hands for a consideration. That is to say, he establishes a child prison, engages a number of employee schoolmasters as turnkeys, and covers up the essential cruelty and unnaturalness of the situation by torturing the children if they do not learn, and calling this process, which is within the capacity of any fool or blackguard, by the sacred name of Teaching.”

“I want to be thoroughly used up when I die for the harder I work the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake.”

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

“A photographer is like a cod, which produces a million eggs in order that one may reach maturity.”

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

“I'm not a teacher: only a fellow traveler of whom you asked the way. I pointed ahead - ahead of myself as well as you.”

“I know your head aches. I know you're tired. I know your nerves are as raw as meat in a butcher's window. But think what you're trying to accomplish - just think what you're dealing with. The majesty and grandeur of the English language; it's the greatest possession we have. The noblest thoughts that ever flowed through the hearts of men are contained in its extraordinary, imaginative and musical mixtures of sounds. And that's what you've set yourself out to conquer, Eliza. And conquer it you will.”

“We must face the fact that society is founded on intolerance. [. . .] We may prate of toleration as we will; but society must always draw a line somewhere between allowable conduct and insanity or crime, in spite of the risk of mistaking sages for lunatics and saviours for blasphemers. We must persecute, even to the death; and all we can do to mitigate the danger of persecution is, first, to be very careful what we persecute, and second, to bear in mind that unless there is a large liberty to shock conventional people, and a well informed sense of the value of originality, individuality, and eccentricity, the result will be apparent stagnation covering a repression of evolutionary forces which will eventually explode with extravagant and probably destructive violence.”

“Then the violet coffin moved again and went in feet first. And behold! The feet burst miraculously into streaming ribbons of garnet coloured lovely flame, smokeless and eager, like pentecostal tongues, and as the whole coffin passed in it sprang into flame all over; and my mother became that beautiful fire.”