The only service a friend can really render is to keep up your courage by holding up to you a mirror in which you can see a noble image of yourself.
— George Bernard Shaw
The first condition of progress is the removal of censorship.
Independence? That's middle class blasphemy. We are all dependent on one another, every soul of us on earth.
When a man says money can do anything, that settles it: he hasn't got any.
The love of economy is the root of all virtue.
A happy family is but an earlier heaven.
General consultant to mankind.
Never fret for an only son, the idea of failure will never occur to him.
I never resist temptation, because I have found that things that are bad for me do not tempt me.
Do not do unto others as you expect they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same.
Alcohol is the anesthesia by which we endure the operation of life.
The trouble with her is that she lacks the power of conversation but not the power of speech.
Why should we take advice on sex from the pope? If he knows anything about it, he shouldn't!
If you must hold yourself up to your children as an object lesson, hold yourself up as a warning and not as an example.
You have learnt something. That always feels at first as if you had lost something.
Only on paper has humanity yet achieved glory, beauty, truth, knowledge, virtue, and abiding love.
If all the economists were laid end to end, they'd never reach a conclusion.
In this world there is always danger for those who are afraid of it.
Success does not consist in never making mistakes but in never making the same one a second time.
The possibilities are numerous once we decide to act and not react.
The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and about all time.
Choose silence of all virtues, for by it you hear other men's imperfections, and conceal your own.
Capitalism has destroyed our belief in any effective power but that of self interest backed by force.
Why, except as a means of livelihood, a man should desire to act on the stage when he has the whole world to act in, is not clear to me.
The great advantage of a hotel is that it is a refuge from home life.
Hegel was right when he said that we learn from history that man can never learn anything from history.
Democracy substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few.
Animals are my friends... and I don't eat my friends.
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.
No man ever believes that the Bible means what it says: He is always convinced that it says what he means.
Marriage is an alliance entered into by a man who can't sleep with the window shut, and a woman who can't sleep with the window open.
What we want is to see the child in pursuit of knowledge, and not knowledge in pursuit of the child.
We have no more right to consume happiness without producing it than to consume wealth without producing it.
Assassination is the extreme form of censorship.
The worst sin toward our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them: that's the essence of inhumanity.
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.
Life would be tolerable but for its amusements.
Censorship ends in logical completeness when nobody is allowed to read any books except the books that nobody reads.
Silence is the most perfect expression of scorn.
All my life affection has been showered upon me, and every forward step I have made has been taken in spite of it.
Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine and at last you create what you will.
It's so hard to know what to do when one wishes earnestly to do right.
He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches.
An asylum for the sane would be empty in America.
Except during the nine months before he draws his first breath, no man manages his affairs as well as a tree does.
Science never solves a problem without creating ten more.
You'll never have a quiet world till you knock the patriotism out of the human race.
Love is a gross exaggeration of the difference between one person and everybody else.
The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it.
The only way to avoid being miserable is not to have enough leisure to wonder whether you are happy or not.
