George Bernard Shaw

"Except during the nine months before he draws his first breath, no man manages his affairs as well as a tree does."

"[H]e is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature."

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

"[A]lthough I well knowhow hard it is for a man of genius with a seriously underrated subject tomaintain serene and kindly relations with the men who underrate it, and whokeep all the best places for less important subjects which they profess withoutoriginality and sometimes without much capacity for them, still, if heoverwhelms them with wrath and disdain, he cannot expect them to heaphonors on him."

"Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine and at last you create what you will."

"Make it a rule never to give a child a book you would not read yourself."

"MRS PEARCE. Mr Higgins: you're tempting the girl. It’s not right. She should think of the future. HIGGINS. At her age! Nonsense! Time enough to think of the future when you haven't any future to think of."

"An author who gives a manager or publisher any rights in his work except those immediately and specifically required for its publication or performance is for business purposes an imbecile."

"...[T]hough the whole point of his Current Shorthand is that it can express every sound in the language perfectly, vowels as well as consonants, and that your hand has to make no stroke except the easy and current ones with which you write m, n, and u, l, p, and q, scribbling them at whatever angle comes easiest to you, his unfortunate determination to make this remarkable and quite legible script serve also as a Shorthand reduced it in his own practice to the most inscrutable of cryptograms. His true objective was the provision of a full, accurate, legible script for our noble but ill-dressed language; but he was led past that by his contempt for the popular Pitman system of Shorthand, which he called the Pitfall system. The triumph of Pitman was a triumph of business organization: there was a weekly paper to persuade you to learn Pitman: there were cheap textbooks and exercise books and transcripts of speeches for you to copy, and schools where experienced teachers coached you up to the necessary proficiency. Sweet could not organize his market in that fashion. He might as well have been the Sybil who tore up the leaves of prophecy that nobody would attend to. The four and six-penny manual, mostly in his lithographed handwriting, that was never vulgarly advertized, may perhaps some day be taken up by a syndicate and pushed upon the public as The Times pushed the Encyclopaedia Britannica; but until then it will certainly not prevail against Pitman."

"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."

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

"You use a glass mirror to see your face; you use works of art to see your soul."

"“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”"

"Socialism, reduced to its simplest legal and practical expression, means the complete discarding of the institution of private property by transforming it into public property, and the division of the resultant public income equally and indiscriminately among the entire population."

"Do not waste your time on Social Questions. What is the matter with the poor is Poverty what is the matter with the rich is Uselessness."

"Home life is no more natural to us than a cage is natural to a cockatoo."

"Choose silence of all virtues, for by it you hear other men's imperfections, and conceal your own."

"Alcohol is the anesthesia by which we endure the operation of life."

"Peace is not only better than war, but infinitely more arduous."

"We are made wise not by the recollection of our past, but by the responsibility for our future."