Quote collection
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"You have to choose between trusting to the natural stability of gold and the natural stability of the honesty and intelligence of the members of the government. And, with due respect to these gentlemen, I advise you, as long as the capitalist system lasts, to vote for gold."
"The best reformers the world has ever seen are those who commence on themselves."
"There is no accomplishment so easy to acquire as politeness and none more profitable."
"NAPOLEON: What shall we do with this soldier, Giuseppe? Everything he says is wrong. GIUSEPPE: Make him a general, Excellency, and then everything he says will be right."
"We should all be obliged to appear before a board every five years and justify our existence... on pain of liquidation."
"Emotional excitement reaches men through tea, tobacco, opium, whisky, and religion."
"Disobedience, the rarest and most courageous of the virtues, is seldom distinguished from neglect, the laziest and commonest of the vices."
"All great art and literature is propaganda."
"I have studied him - the wonderful man - and in my opinion far from being an anti-Christ he must be called the saviour of humanity."
"We are more gullible and superstitious today than we were in the Middle Ages, and an example of modern credulity is the widespread belief that the Earth is round. The average man can advance not a single reason for thinking that the Earth is round. He merely swallows this theory because there is something about it that appeals to the twentieth century mentality."
"When a man of normal habits is ill, everyone hastens to assure him that he is going to recover. When a vegetarian is ill (which fortunately very seldom happens), everyone assures him that he is going to die, and that they told him so, and that it serves him right. They implore him to take at least a little gravy, so as to give himself a chance of lasting out the night"
"What is the use of straining after an amiable view of things, when a cynical view is most likely to be the true one?."
"If you injure your neighbour, better not do it by halves."
"A perpetual holiday is a good working definition of hell."
"Morality is not respectability."
"You can always tell an old soldier by the inside of his holsters and cartridge boxes. The young ones carry pistols and cartridges; the old ones, grub."
"You have set up in New York Harbor a monstrous idol which you call Liberty. The only thing that remains to complete that monument is to put on its pedestal the inscription written by Dante on the gate of hell: All hope abandon ye who enter here."
"As well consult a butcher on the value of vegetarianism as a doctor on the worth of vaccination."
"Life is a flame that is always burning itself out; but it catches fire again every time a child is born. Life is greater than death, and hope than despair."
"You are all alike, you respectable people. You can't tell me the bursting strain of a ten-inch gun, which is a very simple matter;but you all think you can tell me the bursting strain of a man under temptation. You daren't handle high explosives; but you're all ready to handle honesty and truth and justice and the whole duty of man, and kill one another at that game. What a country! What a world!"