Great Throughts Treasury

"When a man wants to murder a tiger he calls it sport: when the tiger wants to murder him he calls it ferocity."

"When I was a young man I observed that nine out of every ten things I did were failures. So I did ten times more work."

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

"Where there is no will there is no way."

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

"A man who has no office to go to - I don't care who he is - is a trial of which you can have no conception."

"All progress is initiated by challenging current conceptions, and executed by supplanting existing institutions."

"All religious organizations exist by selling themselves to the rich."

"A soldier is an anachronism of which we must get rid."

"All great truths began as blasphemies."

"All progress means war with Society."

"An election is a moral horror, as bad as a battle except for the blood: a mud bath for every soul concerned in it."

"Assassination is an extreme form of censorship."

"All who achieve real distinction in life begin as revolutionists. the most distinguished persons become more revolutionary as they grow older, though they are commonly supposed to become more conservative owing to their loss of faith in conventional methods of reform."

"Assassination on the scaffold is the worst form of assassination, because there it is invested with the approval of society."

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

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

"Death is for many of us the gate of hell: but we are inside on the way out, not outside on the way in."

"First love is only a little foolishness and a lot of curiosity."

"Fashions, after all, are only induced epidemics."

"He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches."

"Hell is paved with good intentions, not with bad ones."

"Democracy substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few."

"Every man who has mastered a profession is a skeptic concerning it."

"He who has never hoped can never despair."

"I am convinced that my life belongs to the whole community; and as long as I live, it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can, for the harder I work the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is no brief candle for me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I got hold of for a moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before turning it over to future generations."

"Life is a disease; and the only difference between one man and another is the stage of the disease at which he lives."

"Life is a series of inspired follies. The difficulty is to find them to do. Never lose a chance: it doesn't come every day."

"I enjoy convalescence. It is the part that makes the illness worthwhile."

"I tell you that as long as I can conceive something better than myself I cannot be easy unless I am striving to bring it into existence or clearing the way for it."

"In heaven an angel is nobody in particular."

"Independence? That's middle-class blasphemy. We are all dependent on one another, every soul of us on earth."

"In this world there is always danger for those who are afraid of it."

"Learning learns but one lesson: doubt!"

"Leisure, though the propertied classes give its name to their own idleness, is not idleness. It is not even a luxury: it is a necessity, and a necessity of the first importance. Some of the most valuable work done in the world has been done at leisure, and never paid for in cash or kind. Leisure any be described as free activity, labor as compulsory activity. Leisure does what it likes: labor does what it must, the compulsion being that of Nature, which in these latitudes leaves men no choice between labor and starvation."

"It is easy - terribly easy - to shake a man's faith in himself. to take advantage of that is to break a man's spirit is devil's work."

"Live in contact with dreams, and you will get something of their charm; live in contact with facts, and you will get something of their brutality. I wish I could find a country where the facts were not brutal, and the dreams not unreal."

"Life levels all men: death reveals the eminent."

"Love is a gross exaggeration of the difference between one person and everyone else."

"Military service produces moral imbecility, ferocity and cowardice."

"Nature holds not brief for the human experiment: it must stand or fall by its results. If Man will not serve, Nature will try another experiment."

"No question is so difficult to answer as that to which the answer is obvious."

"Life is not meant to be easy, my child; but take courage: it can be delightful."

"Our laws make law impossible; our liberties destroy all freedom; our property is organized robbery; our morality an impudent hypocrisy; our wisdom is administered by inexperienced or mal-experienced dupes; our power wielded by cowards and weaklings; and our honor false in all its points. I am an enemy of the existing order for good reasons."

"Patriotism is a pernicious, psychopathic form of idiocy."

"Nothing is certain, but uncertainty."

"Property is organized robbery."

"Security, the chief pretense of civilization, cannot exist where the worst of dangers, the danger of poverty, hangs over everyone's head."

"Revolutions have never lightened the burden of tyranny: they have only shifted it to another shoulder."

"Science is always wrong. It never solves a problem without creating ten more."