"A fashion is nothing but an induced epidemic."

"Democracy is a device that ensures we shall be governed no better than we deserve."

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

"Nothing is worth doing unless the consequences may be serious."

"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."

"Baseball has the great advantage over cricket of being sooner ended."

"Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything."

"The faults of the burglar are the qualities of the financier."

"HIGGINS. The great secret, Eliza, is not having bad manners or good manners or any other particular sort of manners, but having the same manner for all human souls: in short, behaving as if were in Heaven, where there are no third-class carriages, and one soul is as good as another."

"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."

"Miracles, in the sense of phenomena we cannot explain, surround us on every hand: life itself is the miracle of miracles."

"My opportunities were still there nay they multiplied tenfold but the strength and youth to cope with them began to fail and to need eking out with the shifty cunning of experience."

"We learn from experience that men never learn anything from experience."

"A man of great common sense and good taste - meaning thereby a man without originality or moral courage."

"All great truths began as blasphemies."

"Man progresses in all things by resolutely making a fool of himself."

"I never resist temptation, because I have found that things that are bad for me do not tempt me."

"Take care to get what you like or you will be forced to like what you get."

"Never waste jealousy on a real man: it is the imaginary man that supplants us all in the long run."

"While browsing in a second-hand bookshop one day, George Bernard Shaw was amused to find a copy of one of his own works which he himself had inscribed for a friend: "To ----, with esteem, George Bernard Shaw."He immediately purchased the book and returned it to the friend with a second inscription: "With renewed esteem, George Bernard Shaw."

"There is no love sincerer than the love of food."

"The heretic is always better dead. And mortal eyes cannot distinguish the saint from the heretic."

"What is life but a series of inspired follies? The difficulty is to find them to do."

"Gentle Jesus, meek and mild' is a snivelling modern invention, with no warrant in the gospels."

"All great truths begin as blasphemies."

"The golden rule is that there are no golden rules."

"The first condition of progress is the removal of censorship."

"The only way to avoid being miserable is not to have enough leisure to wonder whether you are happy or not."

"Belief in God meant belief in the old tribal idol called Jehovah, and I would not pretend I did not know whether it existed or not."

"The philosopher is Nature's pilot. And there you have our difference: to be in hell is to drift: to be in heaven is to steer."

"There are two tragedies in life. One is to lose your heart's desire. The other is to gain it."

"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."

"When two people are under the influence of the most violent, most insane, most delusive, and most transient of passions, they are required to swear that they will remain in that excited, abnormal, and exhausting condition continuously until death do them part."

"Find enough clever things to say, and you're a Prime Minister; write them down and you're a Shakespeare."

"Some donkeys have amazing luck."

"People become attached to their burdens sometimes more than the burdens are attached to them."

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

"If the announcer can produce the impression that he is a gentleman he may pronounce as he pleases."

"Statistics show that of those who contract the habit of eating, very few survive."

"You use a glass mirror to see your face; you use works of art to see your soul."

"My way of joking is to tell the truth. It's the funniest joke in the world."

"Virtue is insufficient temptation."

"I never thought much of the courage of a lion tamer. Inside the cage he is at least safe from people."

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

"Virtue consists, not in abstaining from vice, but in not desiring it."

"Well, I've known over thirty men who've found out how to cure consumption. Why do people go on dying of it, Colly? Devilment I suppose!"

"I need not repeat familiar arguments about the waste of teachers' time, and the difficulties thrown in the way of English children trying to learn their own language; or the fact that nobody without a visual memory for words ever succeeds in spelling conventionally, however highly educated he or she may be."

"I would like to take you seriously, but to do so would be an affront to your intelligence."

"The secret of being miserable is to have leisure to bother about whether you are happy or not. The cure for it is occupation."

"You think, because you have a purpose, Nature must have one. You might as well expect it to have fingers and toes because you do."