Great Throughts Treasury

"Capitalism has destroyed our belief in any effective power but that of self-interest backed by force."

"Capitalism justified itself and was adopted as an economic principle on the express ground that it provides selfish motives for doing good, and that human beings will do nothing except for selfish motives."

"CAPTAIN SHOTOVER: How much does your soul eat?"

"CHARLES. And the courts have declared that your judges were full of corruption and cozenage, fraud and malice. JOAN. Not they. They were as honest a lot of poor fools as ever burned their betters."

"Censorship ends in logical completeness when nobody is allowed to read any books except the books that nobody reads."

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

"Children are the hands by which we take hold of heaven."

"Common people do not pray; they only beg."

"Clever and attractive women do not want to vote; they are willing to let men govern as long as they govern men."

"Choose silence of all virtues, for by it you hear other men's imperfections, and conceal your own."

"Conceive. That is the word that means both the beginning in imagination and the end in creation."

"Common sense is instinct. Enough of it is genius."

"Composers are not human; they can live on diminished sevenths, and be contented with a pianoforte for a wife, and a string quartet for a family."

"Consistency is the enemy of enterprise, just as symmetry is the enemy of art."

"Cruelty must be whitewashed by a moral excuse, and pretense of reluctance."

"Confusing monogamy with morality has done more to destroy the conscience of the human race than any other error."

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

"Cruelty would be delicious if one could only find some sort of cruelty that didn't really hurt."

"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."

"Custom will reconcile people to any atrocity, and fashion will drive them to acquire any custom."

"Dancing is a perpendicular expression of a horizontal desire"

"Dancing is a very crude attempt to get into the rhythm of life."

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

"Decency is indecency s conspiracy of silence"

"Decency cannot be discussed without indecency!"

"Doing what needs to be done may not make you happy, but it will make you great."

"Do not mistake your objection to defeat for an objection to fighting, your objection to being a slave for an objection to slavery, your objection to not being as rich as your neighbor for an objection to poverty. The cowardly, the insubordinate, and the envious share your objections."

"Do not follow where the path my lead. Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail."

"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."

"Do you think that the things people make fools of themselves about are any less real and true than the things they behave sensibly about? They are more true;: they are the only things that are true."

"Do not try to live forever. You will not succeed."

"Dying is a troublesome business: there is pain to be suffered, and it wrings one's heart; but death is a splendid thing -a warfare accomplished, a beginning all over again, a triumph. You can always see that in their faces."

"Don't order any black things. Rejoice in his memory; and be radiant: leave grief to the children. Wear violet and purple... Be patient with the poor people who will snivel: they don't know; and they think they will live forever, which makes death a division instead of a bond."

"Don't think you can frighten me by telling me that I am alone. France is alone. God is alone. And the loneliness of God is His strength."

"Don't fuck with me, fellas. This cowgirl has been to the rodeo before."

"EVE: The Voice does not tell me not to kill you. Yet I do not want you to die before me. No voice is needed to make me feel that. ADAM [throwing his arm round her shoulder with an expression of anguish]: Oh no: that is plain without any voice. There is something that holds us together, something that has no word — THE SERPENT: Love. Love. Love."

"England and America are two countries divided by a common language."

"Eternal is the fact that the human creature born in Ireland and brought up in its air is Irish. I have lived for twenty years in Ireland and for seventy-two in England; but the twenty came first and in Britain I am still a foreigner and shall die one."

"Englishmen hate Liberty and Equality too much to understand them. But every Englishman loves a pedigree."

"Education can and should do much influence social, moral and intellectual discovery by stimulating critical attitudes of thought in the young."

"Englishmen never will be slaves: they are free to do whatever the Government and public opinion allow them to do."

"Even the youngest of us may be wrong sometimes."

"Every child has a right to its own bent... It has a right to find its own way and go its own way, whether that way seems wise or foolish to others, exactly as an adult has. It has a right to privacy as to its own doings and its own affairs as much as if it were its own father."

"Even a vortex is a vortex in something. You can't have a whirlpool without water; and you can't have a vortex without gas, or molecules or atoms or ions or electrons or something, not nothing."

"Even under the most perfect Social Democracy we should, without Communism, still be living like hogs, except that each hog would get his fair share of grub... Whilst we are hogs, let us at least be well-fed, healthy, reciprocally useful hogs, instead of—well, instead of the sort we are at present."

"Every drunken skipper trusts to Providence. But one of the ways of Providence with drunken skippers is to run them on the rocks."

"Every fool believes what his teachers tell him, and calls his credulity science or morality as confidently as his father called it divine revelation."

"Every girl has a right to be loved."

"Every man has in himself a continent of undiscovered character. Happy is he who acts as the Columbus to his own soul."

"Every man over forty is a scoundrel."