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If You Do Things Merely Because You Think Some Other Fool Expects You To Do Them, And He Expects You To Do Them Because He Thinks You Expect Him To Expect You To Do Them, It Will End In Everybody Doing What Nobody Wants To Do, Which Is In My Opinion A Silly State Of Things.

-George Bernard Shaw

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If You Do Things

George Bernard Shaw

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If You Do Things Merely Because You Think Some Other Fool Expects You To Do Them, And He Expects You To Do Them Because He Thinks You Expect Him To Expect You To Do Them, It Will End In Everybody Doing What Nobody Wants To Do, Which Is In My Opinion A Silly State Of Things.

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Make It Compulsory For A Doctor Using A Brass Plate To Have Inscribed On It, In Addition To The Letters Indicating His Qualifications, The Words 'remember That I Too Am Mortal'.

Compassion Is The Fellow-feeling Of The Unsound.

I Shall Always Be A Flower Girl To Professor Higgins, Because He Always Treats Me As A Flower Girl, And Always Will; But I Know I Can Be A Lady To You, Because You Always Treat Me As A Lady, And Always Will.

Thus, I Blush To Add, You Can Not Be A Philosopher And A Good Man, Though You May Be A Philosopher And A Great One.

Like All Young Men, You Greatly Exaggerate The Difference Between One Young Woman And Another.

Though The Life Force Supplies Us With Its Own Purpose, It Has No Other Brains To Work With Than Those It Has Painfully And Imperfectly Evolved In Our Heads.

Every Fool Believes What His Teachers Tell Him, And Calls His Credulity Science Or Morality As Confidently As His Father Called It Divine Revelation.

Imagination Is The Beginning Of Creation. You Imagine What You Desire, You Will What You Imagine And At Last You Create What You Will.

We Live In An Atmosphere Of Shame. We Are Ashamed Of Everything That Is Real About Us; Ashamed Of Ourselves, Of Our Relatives, Of Our Incomes, Of Our Accents, Of Our Opinions, Of Our Experience, Just As We Are Ashamed Of Our Naked Skins.

Orchestras Only Need To Be Sworn At, And A German Is Consequently At An Advantage With Them, As English Profanity, Except In America, Has Not Gone Beyond A Limited Technology Of Perdition.

A Man Learns To Skate By Staggering About And Making A Fool Of Himself. Indeed He Progresses In All Things By Resolutely Making A Fool Of Himself.

Better Keep Yourself Clean And Bright; You Are The Window Through Which You Must See The World.

If Women Were As Fastidious As Men, Morally Or Physically, There Would Be An End Of The Race.

I Am Of The Opinion That My Life Belongs To The Whole Community And As Long As I Live, It Is My Privilege To Do For It Whatever I Can.

Privilege And Responsibility

Islam Is The Best Religion And Muslims Are The Worst Followers

I Appeal To The Chemists To Discover A Humane Gas That Will Kill Instantly And Painlessly. In Short- A Gentlemanly Gas Deadly By All Means, But Humane, Not Cruel.

A Contract For Better For Worse Is A Contract That Should Not Be Tolerated.

Let Wife And Child Perish, And Lay Bricks For Your Last Crust, Rather Than Part With An Iota Of Your [copy]rights.

I Like A State Of Continual Becoming, With A Goal In Front And Not Behind.

The Apparent Multiplication Of Gods Is Bewildering At The First Glance, But You Soon Discover That They Are The Same God. There Is Always One Uttermost God Who Defies Personification. This Makes Hinduism The Most Tolerant Religion In The World, Because Its One Transcendent God Includes All Possible Gods. In Fact Hinduism Is So Elastic And So Subtle That The Most Profound Methodist, And Crudest Idolater, Are Equally At Home With It.

The American Constitution, One Of The Few Modern Political Documents Drawn Up By Men Who Were Forced By The Sternest Circumstances To Think Out What They Really Had To Face, Instead Of Chopping Logic In A University Classroom.

The Truth Sticks In Our Throats With All The Sauces It Is Served With: It Will Never Go Down Until We Take It Without Any Sauce At All.

Democracy Is A Device That Insures We Shall Be Governed No Better Than We Deserve.

When A Heretic Wishes To Avoid Martyrdom He Speaks Of "orthodoxy, True And False" And Demonstrates That The True Is His Heresy.

When God Created Man And Woman, He Did Not Take A Patent. That's Why Any Imbecile Has Been Able To Do So Ever Since.

Life On Board A Pleasure Steamer Violates Every Moral And Physical Condition Of Healthy Life Except Fresh Air. . . . It Is A Guzzling, Lounging, Gambling, Dog's Life. The Only Alternative To Excitement Is Irritability.

How You Ought Properly To Spell 'fish' In English: 'goti' .

Decency Is Indecency's Conspiracy Of Silence

The Universal Regard For Money Is The One Hopeful Fact In Our Civilization.

Nothing Is Ever Done In This World Until Men Are Prepared To Kill One Another If It Is Not Done.

I Loathe The Mess Of Mean Superstitions And Misunderstood Prophecies Which Is Still Rammed Down The Throats Of Children Under The Name Of Christianity.

Don't Order Any Black Things. Rejoice In His Memory; And Be Radiant: Leave Grief To The Children. Wear Violet And Purple. Be Patient With The Poor People Who Will Snivel: They Don't Know; And They Think They Will Live For Ever, Which Makes Death A Division Instead Of A Bond.

Hypocrisy ... Is Only Bad When It Is Improperly Used.

I Claim To Be A Conscientiously Immoral Writer.

Censorship Ends In Logical Completeness When Nobody Is Allowed To Read Any Books Except The Books That Nobody Can Read.

The Moment We Face It Frankly We Are Driven To The Conclusion That The Community Has A Right To Put A Price On The Right To Live In It ... If People Are Fit To Live, Let Them Live Under Decent Human Conditions. If They Are Not Fit To Live, Kill Them In A Decent Human Way. Is It Any Wonder That Some Of Us Are Driven To Prescribe The Lethal Chamber As The Solution For The Hard Cases Which Are At Present Made The Excuse For Dragging All The Other Cases Down To Their Level, And The Only Solution That Will Create A Sense Of Full Social Responsibility In Modern Populations?

Popular Christianity Has For Its Emblem A Gibbet, For Its Chief Sensation A Sanginary Execution After Torture, For Its Central Mystery Is An Insane Vengeance Bought Off By A Trumpery Expiation. But There Is A Nobler And Profounder Christianity Which Affirms The Sacred Mystery Of Equality And Forbids The Glaring Futility And Folly Of Vengeance.

If A Man Is Indolent, Let Him Be Poor. If He Is Drunken, Let Him Be Poor.... Also--somewhat Inconsistently--blessed Are The Poor!

Our Prejudices Are So Deeply Rooted That We Never Think Of Them As Prejudices But Call Them Common Sense.

Hatred Is The Coward's Revenge For Being Intimidated.

There Is At Bottom Only One Genuinely Scientific Treatment For All Diseases, And That Is To Stimulate The Phagocytes.

Marriage Is To Me Apostasy, Profanation Of The Sanctuary Of My Soul, Violation Of My Manhood, Sale Of My Birthright, Shameful Surrender, Ignominious Capitulation, Acceptance Of Defeat.

That Is The Injustice Of A Woman's Lot. A Woman Has To Bring Up Her Children; And That Means To Restrain Them, To Deny Them Things They Want, To Set Them Tasks, To Punish Them When They Do Wrong, To Do All The Unpleasant Things. And Then The Father, Who Has Nothing To Do But Pet Them And Spoil Them, Comes In When All Her Work Is Done And Steals Their Affection From Her.

What Really Flatters A Man Is That You Think Him Worth Flattering.

A Man Never Tells You Anything Until You Contradict Him.

Alcohol Is A Very Necessary Article. It Enables Parliament To Do Things At Eleven At Night That No Sane Person Would Do At Eleven In The Morning.

Men Get Tired Of Everything, Of Heaven No Less Than Of Hell; And That All History Is Nothing But A Record Of The Oscillations Of The World Between These Two Extremes. An Epoch Is But A Swing Of The Pendulum; And Each Generation Thinks The World Is Progressing Because It Is Always Moving.

Two People Getting Together To Write A Book Is Like Three People Getting Together To Have A Baby. One Of Them Is Superfluous.

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Man Can Climb To The Highest Summits, But He Cannot Dwell There Long.

When A Thing Is Funny, Search It Carefully For A Hidden Truth.

This Planet Is Obviously Being Used As An Insane Asylum By Other Planets.

Vegetarians Claim To Be Immune From Most Diseases But They Have Been Known To Die From Time To Time.

I Have Found, After A Good Deal Of Consideration, That The Best Place To Seek God Is In A Garden. You Can Dig For Him Here.

I Become More Convinced That Beings From Other Planets Are Using The Earth As A Lunatic Asylum

Lunatic Asylums

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Only In Books Has Mankind Known Perfect Truth, Love And Beauty.

It Would Positively Be A Relief To Me To Dig Shakespeare Up And Throw Stones At Him.

Hell Is Not All Paved With Bad Intentions.

The Way To Deal With Worldly People Is To Frighten Them By Repeating Their Scandalous Whisperings Aloud.

They Tell Me That So-and-so, Who Does Not Write Prefaces, Is No Charlatan. Well, I Am. I First Caught The Ear Of The British Public On A Cart In Hyde Park, To The Blaring Of Brass Bands,and This . . . Because . . . I Am A Natural-born Mountebank.

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You Have Learnt Something. That Always Feels At First As If You Had Lost Something.

Start With The Belief That Your Life Can Indeed Be Changed, And That You Have The Power To Change It.

Paradoxes Are The Only Truths.

If All The Statisticians In The World Were Laid Head To Toe, They Wouldn't Be Able To Reach A Conclusion

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If The Governments Devalue The Currency In Order To Betray All Creditors, You Politely Call This Procedure 'inflation'.

If You Say That God Is Good, Great, Blessed, Wise Or Any Such Thing, The Starting Point Is This : God Is.

Principles Without Programs Are Platitudes.

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A Dinner! How Horrible! I Am To Be Made The Pretext For Killing All Those Wretched Animals And Birds, And Fish! Thank You For Nothing. Now If It Were To Be A Fast Instead Of A Feast; Say A Solemn Three Days' Abstention From Corpses In My Honour, I Could At Least Pretend To Believe That It Was Disinterested. Blood Sacrifices Are Not In My Line

It Exasperated Her To Think That The Dungeon In Which She Had Languished For So Many Unhappy Years Had Been Unlocked All The Time, And That The Impulses She Had So Carefully Struggled With And Stifled For The Sake Of Keeping Well With Society, Were Precisely Those By Which Alone She Could Have Come Into Any Sort Of Sincere Human Contact.

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Bourgeois Morality Is Largely A System Of Making Cheap Virtues A Cloak For Expensive Vices.

There Is Nothing That Can Be Changed More Completely Than Human Nature When The Job Is Taken In Hand Early Enough.

The Moment We Want To Believe Something, We Suddenly See All The Arguments For It, And Become Blind To The Arguments Against It.

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What A Man Is Depends On His Character; But What He Does, And What We Think Of What He Does, Depends On His Circumstances.

When Commenting On The Turmoil And Disorder Of The World, If The Other Planets Are Inhabited, They Must Be Using This Earth As Their Insane Asylum.

You Are Going To Let The Fear Of Poverty Govern You Life And Your Reward Will Be That You Will Eat, But You Will Not Live.

Americans Adore Me And Will Go On Adoring Me Until I Say Something Nice About Them.

I've Posed Nude For A Photographer In The Manner Of Rodin's Thinker, But I Merely Looked Constipated.

I Don't. I Look My Age; And I Am My Age. It Is The Other People Who Look Older Than They Are. What Can You Expect From People Who Eat Corpses And Drink Spirits?

Social Questions Are Too Sectional, Too Topical, Too Temporal To Move A Man To The Mighty Effort Which Is Needed To Produce Greatpoetry. Prison Reform May Nerve Charles Reade To Produce An Effective And Businesslike Prose Melodrama; But It Could Never Produce Hamlet, Faust, Or Peer Gynt.

Our Way Of Getting An Army Able To Fight The German Army Is To Declare War On Germany Just As If We Had Such An Army, And Then Trust To The Appalling Resultant Peril And Disaster To Drive Us Into Wholesale Enlistment.

No Man Manages His Affairs As Well As A Tree Does

The Sex Relation Is Not A Personal Relation. It Can Be Irresistibly Desired And Rapturously Consummated Between Persons Who Could Not Endure One Another For A Day In Any Other Relation.

Modern Poverty Is Not The Poverty That Was Blest In The Sermon On The Mount.

Sermon On The Mount

Every Man Deserves To Be Judged In The Context Of His Times.

The Universal Regard For Money Is The One Hopeful Fact In Our Civilization. Money Is The Most Important Thing In The World. It Represents Health, Strength, Honor, Generosity And Beauty . . . . Not The Least Of Its Virtues Is That It Destroys Basic People As Certainly As It Fortifies And Dignifies Noble People.

Do Not Mistake Your Objection To Defeat For An Objection To Fighting, Your Objection To Being A Slave For An Objection To Slavery, Your Objection To Not Being As Rich As Your Neighbor For An Objection To Poverty. The Cowardly, The Insubordinate, And The Envious Share Your Objections.

The English Have No Respect For Their Language, And Will Not Teach Their Children To Speak It. They Spell It So Abominably That No Man Can Teach Himself What It Soundslike.it Isimpossible Foran Englishmanto Openhis Mouth Without Making Some Other Englishman Hate Or Despise Him.

Without Danger I Cannot Be Great. That Is How I Pay For Abel's Blood. Danger And Fear Follow My Steps Everywhere. Without Them Courage Would Have No Sense. And It Is Courage, Courage, Courage That Raises The Blood Of Life To Crimson Splendor.

We Call The One Side [of Humanity] Religion, And We Call The Other Science. Religion Is Always Right. ... Science Is Always Wrong; It Is The Very Artifice Of Men. Science Can Never Solve One Problem Without Raising Ten More Problems.

The Statesman Cannot Govern Without Stability Of Belief, True Or False.

Our Lives Are Shaped Not As Much By Our Experiences As By Our Expectations.

Assassination Is The Extreme Form Of Censorship; And It Seems Hard To Justify An Incitement To It On Anti-censorial Principles.

Some People Look At The World And Say 'why?' Some People Look At The World And Say 'why Not?'

Positive Thinking

When A Man Says Money Can Do Anything, That Settles It: He Hasn't Got Any.

The 100% American Is 99% Idiot.

Vulgarity In A King Flatters The Majority Of The Nation.

Here There Is No Hope, And Consequently No Duty, No Work, Nothing To Be Gained By Praying, Nothing To Be Lost By Doing What You Like. Hell, In Short, Is A Place Where You Have Nothing To Do But Amuse Yourself.

Hegel Was Right When He Said That We Learn From History That Men Never Learn Anything From History.

The Greatest Evils And The Worst Of Crimes Is Poverty; Our First Duty, A Duty To Which Every Other Consideration Should Be Sacrificed, Is Not To Be Poor.

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.

In The Arts Of Peace Man Is A Bungler.

The Great Danger Of Conversion In All Ages Has Been That When The Religion Of The High Mind Is Offered To The Lower Mind, The Lower Mind, Feeling Its Fascination Without Understanding It, And Being Incapable Of Rising To It, Drags It Down To Its Level By Degrading It.

The Only Way To Avoid Being Miserable Is Not To Have Enough Leisure To Wonder Whether You Are Happy Or Not.

It Is Not The Number Of Years We Have Behind Us, But The Number We Have Before Us, That Makes Us Careful And Responsible And Determined To Find Out The Truth About Everything.

The Epithet Beautiful Is Used By Surgeons To Describe Operations Which Their Patients Describe As Ghastly, By Physicists To Describe Methods Of Measurement Which Leave Sentimentalists Cold, By Lawyers To Describe Cases Which Ruin All The Parties To Them, And By Lovers To Describe The Objects Of Their Infatuation, However Unattractive They May Appear To The Unaffected Spectators.

The Real Brahms Is Nothing More Than A Sentimental Voluptuary. Rather Tiresomely Addicted To Dressing Himself Up As Handel Or Beethoven And Making A Prolonged And Intolerable Noise.

A Genius Is A Person Who Is Seeing Further And Probing Deeper Than Other People Has A Different Set Of Ethical Valuations From Their And Has Energy Enough To Give Effect To This Extra Vision And Its Valuations In Whatever Manner Best Suits His Or Her

It Is The First Duty Of Every Man Not To Be Poor.

Bible Worship, Though At Its Best It May Achieve Sublimity By Keeping Its Head In The Skies, May Also Make Itself Both Ridiculousand Dangerous By Having Its Feet Off The Ground.

To Be A Champion You Must Live Like One.

Communism, Being The Lay Form Of Catholicism, And Indeed Meaning The Same Thing, Has Never Had Any Lack Of Chaplains.

I Am A Christian. That Obliges Me To Be A Communist.

Journalists Are Too Poorly Paid In This Country To Know Anything That Is Fit For Publication.

The Open Mind Never Acts: When We Have Done Our Utmost To Arrive At A Reasonable Conclusion, We Still Must Close Our Minds For The Moment With A Snap, And Act Dogmatically On Our Conclusions.

Vitality Is A Woman Is A Blind Fury Of Creation.

Men Are Not Governed By Justice, But By Law Or Persuasion. When They Refuse To Be Governed By Law Or Persuasion, They Have To Be Governed By Force Or Fraud, Or Both.

Nobody Can Live In Society Without Conventions. The Reason Why Sensible People Are As Conventional As They Can Bear To Be Is That Conventionality Saves So Much Time And Thought And Trouble And Social Friction Of One Sort Or Another That It Leaves Them Much More Leisure Time For Freedom Than Unconventionality Does.

Marx's Kapital Is Not A Treatise On Socialism; It Is A Gerrymand Against The Bourgeoisie. It Was Supposed To Be Written For The Working Class, But The Working Man Respects The Bourgeoisie And Wants To Be A Bourgeoisie. Marx Never Got A Hold Of Him For A Moment. It Was The Revolting Sons Of The Bourgeoisie Itself, Like Myself, That Painted The Flag Red. The Middle And Upper Classes Are The Revolutionary Element In Society. The Proletariat Is The Conservative Element.

Has Fear Ever Held A Man Back From Anything He Really Wanted?

The Popular Definition Of Tragedy Is Heavy Drama In Which Everyone Is Killed In The Last Act, Comedy Being Light Drama In Which Everyone Is Married In The Last Act.

No Child Should Be Brought Up To Suppose That Its Food And Clothes Come Down From Heaven Or Are Miraculously Conjured From Empty Space By Papa. Loathsome As We Have Made The Idea Of Duty (like The Idea Of Work) We Must Habituate Children To A Sense Of Repayable Obligation To The Community For What They Consume And Enjoy, And Inculcate The Repayment As A Point Of Honor.

The Notion That Inspiration Is Something That Happened Thousands Of Years Ago, And Was Then Finished And Done With. . . The Theory That God Retired From Business At That Period And Has Not Been Heard From Since, Is As Silly As It Is Blasphemous.

Women Upset Everything. When You Let Them Into Your Life, You Find That The Woman Is Driving At One Thing And You're Driving At Another.

Democracy Is A Word All Public Men Use And None Understand.

Youth Is Just Wasted On Young People.

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When A Bishop At The First Shot Abandons The Worship Of Christ And Rallies His Flock Round The Altar Of Mars, He May Be Acting Patriotically... But That Does Not Justify Him In Pretending...that Christ Is, In Effect, Mars.

Do Not Do Unto Others As You Expect They Should Do Unto You. Their Tastes May Not Be The Same.

An American Has No Sense Of Privacy. He Does Not Know What It Means.there Is No Such Thing In The Country.

Woman's Happiness Begins With Her First Love And Ends About Then

I Wish People Would Stop Talking About My Birthday.

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.

Education Can And Should Do Much Influence Social, Moral And Intellectual Discovery By Stimulating Critical Attitudes Of Thought In The Young

Very Few People Can Afford To Be Poor.

An Index Is A Great Leveller.

A Fashion Is Nothing But An Induced Epidemic.

Give Women The Vote, And In Five Years There Will Be A Crushing Tax On Bachelors.

Reminiscences Make One Feel So Deliciously Aged And Sad.

Conceive. That Is The Word That Means Both The Beginning In Imagination And The End In Creation.

The More Ignorant Men Are, The More Convinced Are They That Their Little Parish And Their Little Chapel Is An Apex To Which Civilization And Philosophy Has Painfully Struggled Up The Pyramid Of Time From A Desert Of Savagery.

The Only Way For A Woman To Provide For Herself Decently Is For Her To Be Good To Some Man That Can Afford To Be Good To Her.

My Situation Is A Solemn One: Life Is Offered To Me On The Condition Of Eating Beefsteaks. But Death Is Better Than Cannibalism. My Will Contains Directions For My Funeral, Which Will Be Followed, Not By Mourning Coaches, But By Oxen, Sheep, Flocks Of Poultry, And A Small Traveling Aquarium Of Live Fish, All Wearing White Scarves In Honor Of The Man Who Perished Rather Than Eat His Fellow Creatures. It Will Be, Without The Exception Of Noah's Ark, The Most Remarkable Thing Of Its Kind Ever Seen.

A Modern Gentleman [rich Person] Is Necessarily The Enemy Of His Country. Even In War He Does Not Fight To Defend It, But To Prevent His Power Of Preying On It From Passing To A Foreigner.

If You Demand My Authorities For This And That, I Must Reply That Only Those Who Have Never Hunted Up The Authorities As I Have Believe That There Is Any Authority Who Is Not Contradicted Flatly By Some Other Authority.

It Is A Noteworthy Fact That Kicking And Beating Have Played So Considerable A Part In The Habits Which Necessity Has Imposed On Mankind In Past Ages That The Only Way Of Preventing Civilized Men From Beating And Kicking Their Wives Is To Organize Games In Which They Can Kick And Beat Balls.

The Public Want Actresses, Because They Think All Actresses Bad. They Don't Want Music Or Poetry Because They Know That Both Are Good. So Actors And Actresses Thrive And Poets And Composers Starve.

Consciousness Of A Fact Is Not Knowing It: If It Were, The Fish Would Know More Of The Sea Than The Geographers And The Naturalists.

In This World There Is Always Danger For Those Who Are Afraid Of It.

[man] Progresses In All Things By Making A Fool Of Himself.

All Progress Means War With Society.

Progress Of Society

Do Not Waste Your Time On Social Questions. What Is The Matter With The Poor Is Poverty; What Is The Matter With The Rich Is Uselessness.

Most People Go To Their Grave With Their Music Inside Them.

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.

You Can Lose A Man Like That By Your Own Death, But Not By His.

Death And Dying

I No Longer Desire Happiness: Life Is Nobler Than That.

Don't Wait For The Right Opportunity: Create It.

A Man Who Loses His Money Gains, At The Least, Experience, And Sometimes, Something Better.

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.

Dancing Is A Very Crude Attempt To Get Into The Rhythm Of Life.

The More I See Of The Moneyed Classes, The More I Understand The Guillotine.

No Severity Of Punishment Deters When Detection Is Uncertain, As It Always Must Be.

My Schooling Not Only Failed To Teach Me What It Professed To Be Teaching, But Prevented Me From Being Educated To An Extent Which Infuriates Me When I Think Of All I Might Have Learned At Home By Myself.

When Domestic Servants Are Treated As Human Beings It Is Not Worth While To Keep Them.

We Educate One Another; And We Cannot Do This If Half Of Us Consider The Other Half Not Good Enough To Talk To.

Not Good Enough

Life Is A First Draft... With No Rewrite.

In An Ugly And Unhappy World The Richest Man Can Purchase Nothing But Ugliness And Unhappiness.

I Enjoy Convalescence. It Is The Part That Makes The Illness Worth While.

Remember Always That The Least Plain Sister Is The Family Beauty.

Reasonable Men Adapt Themselves To Their Environment; Unreasonable Men Try To Adapt Their Environment To Themselves. Thus All Progress Is The Result Of The Efforts Of Unreasonable Men.

If More Than Ten Percent Of The Public Likes A Painting, It Should Be Burned.

The Most Anxious Man In A Prison Is The Governor.

I Like To Quote Myself Frequently And Often, It Makes Me Sound Much More Intelligent Than I Actually Am.

If We Women Were Particular About Men's Characters, We Should Never Get Married At All.

It Is Not True That Men Can Be Divided Into Absolutely Honest Persons And Absolutely Dishonest Ones. Our Honesty Varies With The Strain Put On It.

Tradition Will Accustom People To Any Atrocity

Nothing Is Worth Doing Unless The Consequences May Be Serious.

You Propound A Complicated Arithmetical Problem: Say Cubing A Number Containing Four Digits. Give Me A Slate And Half An Hour's Time, And I Can Produce A Wrong Answer.

We Learn From History That We Learn Nothing From History.

We Should Have Had Socialism Already, But For The Socialists, Am Quite Willing To Drop The Name If Dropping It Will Help Me To Get The Thing.

My Method Is To Take The Utmost Trouble To Find The Right Thing To Say, And Then To Say It With The Utmost Levity.

Public Speaking

I Am Giving You Examples Of The Fact That This Creature Man, Who In His Own Selfish Affairs Is A Coward To The Backbone, Will Fight For An Idea Like A Hero. . . . I Tell You, Gentlemen, If You Can Shew A Man A Piece Of What He Now Calls God's Work To Do, And What He Will Later Call By Many New Names, You Can Make Him Entirely Reckless Of The Consequences To Himself Personally.

A Married Man Forms Married Habits And Becomes Dependent On Marriage Just As A Sailor Becomes Dependent On The Sea.

Most People Do Not Pray; They Only Beg.

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

The Best Reformers The World Has Ever Seen Are Those Who Commence On Themselves.

The Truth Is, Hardly Any Of Us Have Ethical Energy Enough For More Than One Really Inflexible Point Of Honor.

Both Optimists And Pessimists Contribute To Society. The Optimist Invents The Aeroplane, The Pessimist The Parachute.

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.

Marry Ann; And At The End Of A Week You'll Find No More Inspiration In Her Than In A Plate Of Muffins.

Success Covers A Multitude Of Blunders.

Congratulations

Don't Ask Me For Promises Until I Know What I Am Promising.

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