The more reasonable a student was in mathematics, the more unreasonable she was in the affairs of real life, concerning which fewtrustworthy postulates have yet been ascertained.
I claim to be a conscientiously immoral writer.
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 lesson intended by an author is hardly ever the lesson the world chooses to learn from his book.
Freedom, my good girl, means being able to count on how other people will behave.
It is a monstrous thing to force a child to learn Latin or Greek or mathematics on the ground that they are an indispensable gymnastic for the mental powers. It would be monstrous even if it were true.
A pornographic novelist is one who exploits the sexual instinct as a prostitute does. A legitimate sex novel elucidates it or brings out its poetry, tragedy, or comedy.
What is any respectable girl brought up to do but to catch some rich man’s fancy and get the benefit of his money by marrying him? – as if a marriage ceremony could make any difference in the right or wrong of the thing!
The sex illusion is not a fixed quantity: not what mathematicians call a constant. It varies from zero in my wife’s case to madness in that of our stepsister.
Every dream is a prophecy: every jest is an earnest in the womb of Time.
As long as you don’t fly openly in the face of society, society doesn’t ask any inconvenient questions; and it makes precious short work of the cads who do. There are no secrets better kept than the secrets everybody guesses.
Why not give Christianity a trial?
It’s a dangerous thing to be married right up to the hilt, like my daughter’s husband. The man is at home all day, like a damned soul in hell.
A contract for better for worse is a contract that should not be tolerated.
Most married couples spend the whole day apart, the woman in the house, the man in the office or study or workshop.
Unless the law of marriage were first made human, it could never become divine.
When I speak of The Case for Equality I mean human equality; and that, of course, can only mean one thing: it means equality of income.
The function of the actor is to make the audience imagine for the moment that real things are happening to real people.
A conquered nation is like a man with cancer: he can think of nothing else.
Democracy means the organization of society for the benefit and at the expense of everybody indiscriminately and not for the benefit of a privileged class.