We have no more right to consume happiness without producing it than to consume wealth without producing it.
I'm only a beer teetotaler, not a champagne teetotaler. I don't like beer.
The great advantage of a hotel is that it's a refuge from home life.
My specialty is being right when other people are wrong.
You're not a man, you're a machine.
The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them: that's the essence of inhumanity.
Martyrdom, sir, is what these people like: it is the only way in which a man can become famous without ability.
[Chess] is a foolish expedient for making idle people believe they are doing something very clever, when they are only wasting their time.
Assassination is the extreme form of censorship; and it seems hard to justify an incitement to it on anti-censorial principles.
Why was I born with such contemporaries?
As long as I have a want, I have a reason for living. Satisfaction is death.
Custom will reconcile people to any atrocity; and fashion will drive them to acquire any custom.
You'll never have a quiet world till you knock the patriotism out of the human race.
Political necessities sometimes turn out to be political mistakes.
I have defined the 100 per cent American as 99 per cent an idiot.
An American has no sense of privacy. He does not know what it means. There is no such thing in the country
The apparent multiplicity of Gods is bewildering at the first glance; but you presently discover that they are all the same one God in different aspects and functions and even sexes. There is always one uttermost God who defies personification. This makes Hinduism the most tolerant religion in the world, because its one transcendent God includes all possible Gods… Hinduism is so elastic and so subtle that the profoundest Methodist and the crudest idolater are equally at home in it.
Islam is very different, being ferociously intolerant. What I may call Manifold Monotheism becomes in the minds of very simple folk an absurdly polytheistic idolatry, just as European peasants not only worship Saints and the Virgin as Gods, but will fight fanatically for their faith in the ugly little black doll who is the Virgin of their own Church against the black doll of the next village. When the Arabs had run this sort of idolatry to such extremes ... they did this without black dolls and worshipped any stone that looked funny, Mahomet rose up at the risk of his life and insulted the stones shockingly, declaring that there is only one God, Allah, the glorious, the great… And there was to be no nonsense about toleration. You accepted Allah or you had your throat cut by someone who did accept him, and who went to Paradise for having sent you to Hell. Mahomet was a great Protestant religious force, like George Fox or Wesley….
There is actually a great Hindu sect, the Jains, with Temples of amazing magnificence, which abolish God, not on materialist atheist considerations, but as unspeakable and unknowable, transcending all human comprehension.
A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.
The road to ignorance is paved with good editions. Only the illiterate can afford to buy good books now.
The secret of success is to offend the greatest number of people.
The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.
People are always blaming circumstances for what they are. I don't believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and, if they can't find them, make them.
There are no secrets better kept than the secrets everybody guesses.
The public want actresses, because they think all actresses bad. They don't want music or poetry because they know that both are good. So actors and actresses thrive and poets and composers starve.
There are some men who are considered quite ugly, but who are more remarkable than pretty people. You often see that in artists.
I hate singers, a miserable crew who think that music exists only in their own throats.
The only man I know who behaves sensibly is my tailor; he takes my measurements anew each time he sees me. The rest go on with their old measurements and expect me to fit them.
The greatest of evils and the worst of crimes is poverty.
I can't talk religion to a man with bodily hunger in his eyes.
You cannot have power for good without having power for evil too. Even mother's milk nourishes murderers as well as heroes.
You can't be a hero without being a coward.
What really flatters a man is that you think him worth flattering.
My way of joking is to tell the truth. It's the funniest joke in the world.
The whole strength of England lies in the fact that the enormous majority of the English people are snobs.
You don't learn to hold your own in the world by standing on guard, but by attacking, and getting well hammered yourself.
Religion is a great force — the only real motive force in the world; but what you fellows dont understand is that you must get at a man through his own religion and not through yours. Instead of facing that fact, you persist in trying to convert all men to your own little sect, so that you can use it against them afterwards. You are all missionaries and proselytizers trying to uproot the native religion from your neighbor's flowerbeds and plant your own in its place. You would rather let a child perish in ignorance than have it taught by a rival sectary. You can talk to me of the quintessential equality of coal merchants and British officers; and yet you can't see the quintessential equality of all the religions.
It is more dangerous to be a great prophet or poet than to promote twenty companies for swindling simple folk out of their savings.
If parents would only realize how they bore their children!
Do not try to live for ever. You will not succeed.
Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh.
The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one. The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality of happiness, and by no means a necessity of life.
I hear you say "Why?" Always "Why?" You see things; and you say "Why?" But I dream things that never were; and I say "Why not?"
Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire; you will what you imagine; and at last you create what you will.
Everything happens to everybody sooner or later if there is time enough.
GBS :Madam, would you sleep with me for a million pounds?
Actress : My goodness, Well, I'd certainly think about it
GBS : Would you sleep with me for a pound?
Actress : Certainly not! What kind of woman do you think I am?!
GBS : Madam, we've already established that. Now we are haggling about the price.
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