George Bernard Shaw

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.

Wicked people means people who have no love: therefore, they have no shame. They have the power to ask love because they don't need it: they have the power to offer it because they have none to give.

You are the window through which you must see the world.

You in America should trust to that volcanic political instinct which I have divined in you.

Whenever you wish to do anything against the law, Cicely, always consult a good solicitor first.

Wilde's permanent celebrity belongs to literature, and only his transient notoriety to police news.

You can always tell an old soldier by the inside of his holsters and cartridge boxes. The young ones carry pistols and cartridges; the old ones, grub.

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.

Where equality is undisputed, so also is subordination.

Wise kings wear shabby clothes, and leave the gold lace to the drum major.

You can easily find people who are ten times as rich at sixty as they were at twenty; but not one of them will tell you that they are ten times as happy.

You ll never have a quiet world till you knock the patriotism out of the human race.

Where there is no religion, hypocrisy becomes good taste

With the exception of capitalism, there is nothing so revolting as revolution

You can feel nothing but a torment, and believe nothing but a lie. You will not raise your head to look at all the miracles of life that surround you; but you will run ten miles to see a fight or a death.

You may remember that on earth—though of course we never confessed it—the death of anyone we knew, even those we liked best, was always mingled with a certain satisfaction at being finally done with them.

Where you now see reform, progress, fulfillment of upward tendency, continual ascent by Man on the stepping stones of his dead selves to higher things, you will see nothing but an infinite comedy of illusion. You will discover the profound truth of the saying of my friend Koheleth, that there is nothing new under the sun.

With the single exception of Homer, there is no eminent writer, not even Sir Walter Scott, whom I can despise so entirely as I despise Shakespeare when I measure my mind against his.

You can lose a man like that by your own death, but not by his.

You must not suppose, because I am a man of letters, that I never tried to earn an honest living.

When the horrors of anarchy force us to set up laws that forbid us to fight and torture one another for sport, we still snatch at every excuse for declaring individuals outside the protection of law and torturing them to our hearts content.

Which painting in the National Gallery would I save if there was a fire? The one nearest the door of course.

Without art the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable.

You can talk about capitalism and communism and all that sort of thing, but the important thing is the struggle everybody is engaged in to get better living conditions, and they are not interested too much in government.

You never can tell.