Great Throughts Treasury

"All very fine, Mary; but my old-fashioned common sense is better than your clever modern nonsense."

"Always let your flattery be seen through for what really flatters a man is that you think him worth flattering."

"Although I cannot lay an egg, I am a very good judge of omelettes."

"An asylum for the sane would be empty in America."

"An author who gives a manager or publisher any rights in his work except those immediately and specifically required for its publication or performance is for business purposes an imbecile."

"Americans adore me and will go on adoring me until I say something nice about them."

"Always People are always blaming their circumstances, but I Oaamn circumstances. Successful people in this world are the people who are in the morning and are looking for favorable conditions, and if no pricing they made."

"An American has no sense of privacy. He does not know what it means. There is no such thing in the country."

"An Irishman's heart is nothing but his imagination."

"An index is a great leveler."

"An Englishman thinks he is moral when he is only uncomfortable."

"Anarchism is a game at which the police can beat you."

"And so, to the end of history, murder shall breed murder, always in the name of right and honor and peace, until the gods are tired of blood and create a race that can understand."

"Animals are my friends, and I don t eat my friends"

"Any belief worth having must survive doubt."

"Any man over forty is a scoundrel."

"Any sort of plain speaking is better than the nauseous sham good fellowship our democratic public men get up for shop use."

"Any man who is not a communist at the age of twenty is a fool. Any man who is still a communist at the age of thirty is an even bigger fool."

"As it is not a settled question, you must clear your mind of the fancy with which we all begin as children, that the institutions under which we live, including our legal ways of distributing income and allowing people to own things, are natural, like the weather. They are not. Because they exist everywhere in our little world, we take it for granted that they have always existed and must always exist, and that they are self-acting. That is a dangerous mistake. They are in fact transient makeshifts; and many of them would not be obeyed, even by well-meaning people, if there were not a policeman within call and a prison within reach. They are being changed continually by Parliament, because we are never satisfied with them... At the elections some candidates get votes by promising to make new laws or to get rid of old ones, and others by promising to keep things just as they are. This is impossible. Things will not stay as they are. Changes that nobody ever believed possible take place in a few generations. Children nowadays think that spending nine years in school, oldage and widows’ pensions, votes for women, and short-skirted ladies in Parliament or pleading in barristers’ wigs in the courts are part of the order of Nature, and always were and ever shall be; but their great-grandmothers would have set down anyone who told them that such things were coming as mad, and anyone who wanted them to come as wicked."

"Any public committee man who tries to pack the moral cards in the interest of his own notions is guilty of corruption and impertinence. The business of a public library is not to supply the public with the books the committee thinks good for the public, but to supply the public with the books the public wants… Censorship ends in logical completeness when nobody is allowed to read any books except the books that nobody can read. But as the ratepayer is mostly a coward and a fool in these difficult matters, and the committee is quite sure that it can succeed where the Roman Catholic Church has made its index expurgatorius the laughing-stock of the world, censorship will rage until it reduces itself to absurdity; and even then the best books will be in danger still."

"Art is the magic mirror you make to reflect your invisible dreams in visible pictures. You use a glass mirror to see your face: you use works of art to see your soul. But we who are older use neither glass mirrors nor works of art.We have a direct sense of life. When you gain that you will put aside your mirrors and statues, your toys and your dolls."

"As an old soldier I admit the cowardice: it's as universal as sea sickness, and matters just as little."

"As you say, I am honored and famous and rich. But as I have to do all the hard work, and suffer an increasing multitude of fools gladly, it does not feel any better than being reviled, infamous and poor, as I used to be."

"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. ."

"As long as more people will pay admission to a theater to see a naked body than to see a naked brain, the drama will languish."

"Assassination is the extreme form of censorship; and it seems hard to justify an incitement to it on anti-censorial principles."

"Atrocities are not less atrocities when they occur in laboratories and are called medical research."

"Bear it like a man, even if you feel it like an ass."

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

"At present there is not a single credible established religion in the world."

"Attention and activity lead to mistakes as well as to successes; but a life spent in making mistakes is not only more honorable but more useful than a life spent doing nothing."

"Better never than late."

"Beauty is all very well at first sight, but whoever looks at it when it has been in the house three days?"

"Between persons of equal income there is no social distinction except the distinction of merit. Money is nothing: character, conduct, and capacity are everything. There would be great people and ordinary people and little people, but the great would always be those who had done great things, and never the idiots whose mothers had spoiled them and whose fathers had left them a hundred thousand a year; and the little would be persons of small minds and mean characters, and not poor persons who had never had a chance. That is why idiots are always in favor of inequality of income (their only chance of eminence), and the really great in favor of equality."

"Beauty is a short-lived tyranny."

"Better see rightly on a pound a week than squint on a million."

"Beware of false knowledge; it is more dangerous than ignorance."

"Beware of the man whose God is in the skies."

"Blood is just red sweat."

"Both optimists and pessimists contribute to society. The optimist invents the airplane, the pessimist invents the parachute."

"Beware of the pursuit of the Superhuman: it leads to an indiscriminate contempt for the Human."

"BRITANNUS (shocked). CAESAR: This is not proper. THEODOTUS (outraged). How! CAESAR (recovering his self-possession): Pardon him. THEODOTUS: He is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature."

"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."

"But a mother is like a broomstick or like the sun in the heavens, it does not matter which as far as one's knowledge of her is concerned: the broomstick is there and the sun is there; and whether the child is beaten by it or warmed and enlightened by it, it accepts it as a fact in nature, and does not conceive it as having had youth, passions, and weaknesses, or as still growing, yearning, suffering, and learning."

"But no public man in these islands ever believes that the Bible means what it says: he is always convinced that it says what he means; and I have no reason to hope that Mr Coote may be an exception to the rule."

"Build a system that even a fool can use, and only a fool will want to use it."

"But to admire a strong person and to live under that strong person’s thumb are two different things."

"But you have no idea how frightfully interesting it is to take a human being and change her into a quite different human being by creating a new speech for her. It's filling up the deepest gulf that separates class from class and soul from soul."

"Cannot possibly attend first night; will attend second, if there is one."

"But whether the risks to which liberty exposes us are moral or physical our right to liberty involves the right to run them. A man who is not free to risk his neck as an aviator or his soul as a heretic is not free at all; and the right to liberty begins, not at the age of 21 years but 21 seconds."