George Bernard Shaw

Riches and Art are spurious receipts for the production of Happiness and Beauty.

Happiness and Beauty are by-products.

In a stupid nation the man of genius becomes a god: everybody worships him and nobody does his will.

Disobedience, the rarest and most courageous of the virtues, is seldom distinguished from neglect, the laziest and commonest of the vices.

Obedience simulates subordination as fear of the police simulates honesty.

Self-denial is not a virtue: it is only the effect of prudence on rascality.

Beware of the man whose god is in the skies.

There are no perfectly honorable men; but every true man has one main point of honor and a few minor ones.

It is not necessary to replace a guillotined criminal: it is necessary to replace a guillotined social system.

When a man wants to murder a tiger he calls it sport: when the tiger wants to murder him he calls it ferocity. The distinction between Crime and Justice is no greater.

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

The man who has graduated from the flogging block at Eton to the bench from which he sentences the garrotter to be flogged is the same social product as the garrotter who has been kicked by his father and cuffed by his mother until he has …

No man can be a pure specialist without being in the strict sense an idiot.

Every fool believes what his teachers tell him, and calls his credulity science or morality as confidently as his father called it divine revelation.

The best brought-up children are those who have seen their parents as they are. Hypocrisy is not the parent's first duty.

A fool's brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry.

Where equality is undisputed, so also is subordination.

The duke inquires contemptuously whether his gamekeeper is the equal of the Astronomer Royal; but he insists that they shall both be hanged equally if they murder him.

Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.

He who confuses political liberty with freedom and political equality with similarity has never thought for five minutes about either.

Democracy substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few.

If the lesser mind could measure the greater as a foot-rule can measure a pyramid, there would be finality in universal suffrage. As it is, the political problem remains unsolved.

Do not do unto others as you would expect they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same.

Economy is the art of making the most of life. The love of economy is the root of all virtue.