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.

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

If all economists were laid end to end, they would not reach a conclusion.

We learn of history that we haven't learned anything of history.

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 they part.

I am a millionaire. That is my religion.

Nothing is ever accomplished by a reasonable man.

I don't believe in morality. I am a disciple of Bernard Shaw.

The longer I live the more I see that I am never wrong about anything and that all the pains that I have so humbly taken to verify my notions have only wasted my time.

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

You see things and say Why? but I dream things that never were and I say 'Why Not?'.

How can what an Englishman believes be heresy? It is a contradiction in terms.

There are some experiences in life which should not be demanded twice from any man, and one of them is listening to the Brahms Requiem.

If parents would only realise how they bore their own children!

There is no sincerer love than love of food.

In heaven an angel is nobody in particular.

If you must hold yourself up to your children as an object lesson, hold yourself up as a warning and not as an example.

Is the devil to have all the passions as well as all the good tunes?

I am not a teacher, only a fellow traveller of whom you asked the way. I pointed ahead - ahead of myself as well as of you.

It's all the young can do for the old, to shock them and keep them up to date.

Chess is a foolish expedient for making idle people believe they are doing something very clever when they are only wasting their time.

Do not waste your time on Social Questions. What the matter is with the poor is poverty; what the matter with is the rich is uselessness.

Do not try to live for ever. You will not succeed.

Every man is a revolutionist concerning the thing he understands. For example, every person who has mastered a profession is a sceptic concerning it, and consequently a revolutionist.

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

Vitality in a woman is a blind fury of creation. She sacrifices herself to it.

Patriotism is a pernicious, psychotic form of idiocy.

What Englishman will give his mind to politics as long as he can afford to keep a motor car?

Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all others because you were born in it.

When a stupid man is doing something he is ashamed of, he always declares that it is his duty.

Peace is not only better than war, but infinitely more arduous.

Reviewing has one advantage over suicide; in suicide you take it out on yourself; in reviewing you take it out on other people.

Shaw had lost the art of conversation, but not, unfortunately, the power of speech.

We must make the world honest before we can honestly say to our children that honesty is the best policy.

Sherlock Holmes was a drug addict without a single amiable trait.

Life does not cease to be funny when people die; any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh.

A lifetime of happiness! No man alive could bear it: it would be hell on earth.

Alcohol is a very necessary article. It makes life bearable to millions of people who could not endure their existence if they were quite sober. it enables Parliament to do things at eleven at night that no sane person would do at eleven in the morning.

A miracle, my friend, is an event which creates faith. That is the purpose and nature of miracles. Frauds deceive. An event which creates faith does not deceive: therefore, it is not a fraud, but a miracle.

Anarchism is game at which the police can beat you.

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

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

The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them; that's the essence of humanity.