You have a choice of trusting the natural stability of gold, or the honesty and intelligence of members of government.
I am highly susceptible to the force of all truly religious music, especially to the music of my own church, the church of Shelley, Michelangelo, and Beethoven.
Even if animal experimentation was proved to be of value, it would be morally wrong.
The world was to Shakespeare a great stage of fools on which he was utterly bewildered. His pregnant observations of life are not coordinated into any philosophy.
Our lives are shaped not as much by our experiences as by our expectations.
Every man deserves to be judged in the context of his times.
Bourgeois morality is largely a system of making cheap virtues a cloak for expensive vices.
The fact is that the intrinsic worth of the book, play or whatever the author is trying to sell is the least, last factor in the the whole transaction.
I object to publishers: the one service they have done me is to teach me to do without them. They combine commercial rascality with artistic touchiness and pettishness, without being either good business men or fine judges of literature.
Taking all the round of professions and occupations, you will find that every man is the worse for being poor; and the doctor is a specially dangerous man when poor.
Style is effectiveness of assertion.
You know, Tolstoy, like myself, wasn’t taken in by superstitions like science and medicine.
A man who desires to get married should know everything or nothing.
I must have been an insufferable child; all children are.
It is very doubtful whether man is enough of a political animal to produce a good, sensible, serious and efficient constitution. All the evidence is against it.
Life’s no brief candle-it’s a splendid torch!
Now of all the idealist abominations that make society pestiferous I doubt if there be any so mean as that of forcing self-sacrifice on a woman under the pretense that she likes it.
The only power a god can teach is the power of doing without happiness.
To the person with a toothache, even if the world is tottering, there is nothing more important than a visit to a dentist.
The notion that disarmament can put a stop to war is contradicted by the nearest dogfight.