George Bernard Shaw

Undershaft: You have made for yourself something that you call a morality or a religion or what not. It doesn't fit the facts. Well, scrap it. Scrap it and get one that does fit. That is what is wrong with the world at present. It scraps its obsolete steam engines and dynamos; but it wont scrap its old prejudices and its old moralities and its old religions and its old political constitutions. Whats the result? In machinery it does very well; but in morals and religion and politics it is working at a loss that brings it nearer bankruptcy every year.

What really flatters a man is that you think him worth flattering.

The faults of the burglar are the qualities of the financier: the manners and habits of a duke would cost a city clerk his situation.

The greatest of evils and the worst of crimes is poverty.

Undershaft: My religion? Well, my dear, I am a Millionaire. That is my religion.

He knows nothing; and he thinks he knows everything. That points clearly to a political career.

I exclude the hypothesis of complete originality on [Charles] Lever's part, because a man can no more be completely original in that sense than a tree can grow out of air.

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

Cusins: Call you poverty a crime?

Undershaft: The worst of crimes. All the other crimes are virtues beside it: all the other dishonors are chivalry itself by comparison. Poverty blights whole cities; spreads horrible pestilences; strikes dead the very souls of all who come within sight, sound or smell of it. What you call crime is nothing: a murder here and a theft there, a blow now and a curse then: what do they matter? they are only the accidents and illnesses of life: there are not fifty genuine professional criminals in London. But there are millions of poor people, abject people, dirty people, ill fed, ill clothed people. They poison us morally and physically: they kill the happiness of society: they force us to do away with our own liberties and to organize unnatural cruelties for fear they should rise against us and drag us down into their abyss. Only fools fear crime: we all fear poverty.

Society, with all its prisons and bayonets and whips and ostracisms and starvations, is powerless in the face of the Anarchist who is prepared to sacrifice his own life in the battle with it. Our natural safety from the cheap and devastating explosives which every Russian student can make ... lies in the fact that brave and resolute men, when they are rascals, will not risk their skins for the good of humanity, and, when they are sympathetic enough to care for humanity, abhor murder, and never commit it until their consciences are outraged beyond endurance. The remedy is, then, simply not to outrage their consciences.

Even the youngest of us may be wrong sometimes.

I hate singers, a miserable crew who think that music exists only in their own throats.