No community has ever yet passed beyond the initial phases in which its pugnacity and fanaticism enabled it to found a nation, and its cupidity to establish and develop a commercial civilization.
The vilest abortionist is he who attempts to mould a child’s character.
Assasination on the scaffold is the worst form of assasination, because there it is invested with the approval of society.
Crime is only the retail department of what, in wholesale, we call penal law.
Property, said Proudhon, is theft. This is the only perfect truism that has been uttered on the subject.
Obedience simulates subordination as fear of the police simulates honesty.
Those who minister to poverty and disease are accomplices in the two worst of all the crimes.
If the wicked flourish and the fittest survive, Nature must be the god of rascals.
Never believe anything a writer tells you about himself. A man comes to believe in the end the lies he tells himself about himself.
Those who are looking for paradise on Earth should come and see Dubrovnik.
Absolute honesty is as absurd an abstraction as an absolute temperature or an absolute value.
Affection between adults – if they are really adult in mind and not merely grown up children – and creatures so relatively selfish and cruel as children necessarily are without knowing it or meaning it, cannot be called natural.
Of all human struggles there is none so treacherous and remorseless as the struggle between the artist man and the mother woman.
Give women the vote, and in five years there will be a crushing tax on bachelors.
It is one of the mysterious ways of Allah to make women troublesome when he makes them beautiful.
There is only one belief that can rob death of its sting and the grave of its victory. For without that you cannot be born again.
The statesman cannot govern without stability of belief, true or false.
If you say that God is good, great, blessed, wise or any such thing, the starting point is this : God is.
The stock actor is a stage calamity.
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.