Quote collection
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"My own education has been entirely controversial: that is why I know what I am writing about; and appear eccentric to dogmatically educated Old School Ties whose heads are stuffed with obsolete shibboleths."
"All religions begin with a revolt against morality, and perish when morality conquers them."
"Laws, religions, creeds, and systems of ethics, instead of making society better than its best unit, make it worse than its average unit, because they are never up to date."
"When the military man approaches, the world locks up its spoons and packs off its womankind."
"If the wicked flourish and the fittest survive, Nature must be the god of rascals."
"I was told that my diet was so poor that I could not repair the bones that were broken and operated on. So I have just had an Xradiograph taken; and lo! perfectly mended solid bone so beautifully white that I have left instructions that, if I die, a glove stretcher is to be made of me and sent to you as a souvenir"
"Those who admire modern civilization usually identify it with the steam engine and the electric telegraph."
"Civilization is a disease produced by the practice of building societies with rotten material."
"There is no subject on which more dangerous nonsense is talked and thought than marriage."
"The truth is, hardly any of us have ethical energy enough for more than one really inflexible point of honor."
"The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and about all time."
"The British soldier can stand up to anything except the British War Office."
"Few of us have vitality enough to make any of our instincts imperious."
"I find that the moment I let a woman make friends with me, she becomes jealous, exacting, suspicious, and a damned nuisance. I find that the moment I let myself make friends with a woman, I become selfish and tyrannical."
"The most intolerable pain is produced by prolonging the keenest pleasure."
"With the single exception of Homer, there is no eminent writer, not even Sir Walter Scott, whom I can despise so entirely as I despise Shakespeare when I measure my mind against his. . . . It would positively be a relief to me to dig him up and throw stones at him."
"Let not the right side of your brain know what the left side doeth."
"I do not waste my time writing pot-boilers: the pot must be boiled, and even my pot au feu has some chunks of fresh meat in it. ...I have no time to boil myself down; and anyhow I could not do so and preserve all the necessary nutriment and the flavoring on which the digestibility depends."
"The word morality, if we met it in the Bible, would surprise us as much as the word telephone or motor car."
"You have learnt something. That always feels at first as if you had lost something."