George Bernard Shaw

If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance.

People are always blaming their 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.

Life is no brief candle to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got a hold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.

Schools and schoolmasters, as we have them today, are not popular as places of education and teachers, but rather prisons and turnkeys in which children are kept to prevent them disturbing and chaperoning their parent.

There is, on the whole, nothing on earth intended for innocent people so horrible as a school. To begin with, it is a prison. But in some respects more cruel than a prison. In a prison, for instance, you are not forced to read books written by the warders and the governor. . . .In the prison you are not forced to sit listening to turnkeys discoursing without charm or interest on subjects that they don't understand and don't care about, and therefore incapable of making you understand or care about. In a prison they may torture your body; but they do not torture your brains.

What is the matter with universities is that the students are school children, whereas it is of the very essence of university education that they should be adults.

Success does not consist in never making mistakes but in never making the same one a second time.

In heaven an angel is no one in particular.

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.

What we want to see is the child in pursuit of the knowledge not the knowledge in pursuit of the child.

You have learnt something. That always feels at first as if you have lost something.

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.

Very few people can afford to be poor.