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The Writer Who Aims At Producing The Platitudes Which Are "not For An Age, But For All Time" Has His Reward In Being Unreadable Inall Ages.... The Man Who Writes About Himself And His Own Time Is The Only Sort Of Man Who Writes About All People And About All Time.

-George Bernard Shaw

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The Writer Who Aims

George Bernard Shaw

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The Writer Who Aims At Producing The Platitudes Which Are "not For An Age, But For All Time" Has His Reward In Being Unreadable Inall Ages.... The Man Who Writes About Himself And His Own Time Is The Only Sort Of Man Who Writes About All People And About All Time.

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More From George Bernard Shaw

It's Easier To Replace A Dead Man Than A Good Picture.

England And America Are Two Countries Separated By The Same Language.

When A Prisoner Sees The Door Of His Dungeon Open, He Dashes For It Without Stopping To Think Where He Shall Get His Dinner Outside.

What You Are To Do Without Me I Cannot Imagine.

He Who Confuses Political Liberty With Freedom And Political Equality With Similarity Has Never Thought For Five Minutes About Either.

The Art Of Government Is The Organisation Of Idolatry.

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.

You Can Easily Find People Who Are Ten Times As Rich At Sixty As They Were At Twenty But Not One Of Them Will Tell You That They Are Ten Times As Happy

There Is Nothing On Earth More Exquisite Than A Bonny Book, With Well-placed Columns Of Rich Black Writing In Beautiful Borders, And Illuminated Pictures Cunningly Inset. But Nowadays, Instead Of Looking At Books, People Read Them. A Book Might As Well Be One Of Those Orders For Bacon And Bran.

The Difference Between A Lady And A Flower Girl Is Not How She Behaves, But How She’s Treated.

The Heretic Is Always Better Dead. And Mortal Eyes Cannot Distinguish The Saint From The Heretic.

The Only Person Who Acts Sensibly Is My Tailor. He Takes My Measure Anew Every Time He Sees Me. Everyone Else Goes By Their Old Measurements.

I Sold Flowers. I Didn't Sell Myself. Now You've Made A Lady Of Me I'm Not Fit To Sell Anything Else.

The Things Most People Want To Know About Are Usually None Of Their Business.

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.

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

All Great Truths Begin As Blasphemies.

How Can What An Englishman Believes Be Hearsay? It Is A Contradiction In Terms.

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.

If You Lived In London, Where The Whole System Is One Of False Good-fellowship, And You May Know A Man For Twenty Years Without Finding Out That He Hates You Like Poison, You Would Soon Have Your Eyes Opened. There We Do Unkind Things In A Kind Way: We Say Bitter Things In A Sweet Voice: We Always Give Our Friends Chloroform When We Tear Them To Pieces.

A Miracle Is An Event Which Creates Faith. That Is The Purpose And Nature Of Miracles. Frauds Deceive. An Event Which Creates Faith Does Not Deceive: Therefore It Is Not A Fraud, But A Miracle.

To Me The Sole Hope Of Human Salvation Lies In Teaching.

The Unconscious Self Is The Real Genius. Your Breathing Goes Wrong The Moment Your Conscious Self Meddles With It.

First Really Like Is Just A Little Bit Foolishness As Well As A Lot Of Curiosity. No Actually Self-respecting Girl Would Reap The Benefits Of It.

Those Who Understand The Steam Engine And The Electric Telegraph Spend Their Lives In Trying To Replace Them With Something Better.

The Whole World Is Strewn With Snares, Traps, Gins And Pitfalls For The Capture Of Men By Women.

I Really Don't Think I Could Consent To Go To Heaven If I Thought There Were No Animals There.

The Golden Rule Is That There Are No Golden Rules.

Unless The Law Of Marriage Were First Made Human, It Could Never Become Divine.

No King On Earth Is As Safe In His Job As A Trade Union Official. There Is Only One Thing That Can Get Him Sacked; And That Is Drink. Not Even That, As Long As He Doesn't Actually Fall Down.

If The Announcer Can Produce The Impression That He Is A Gentleman, He May Pronounce As He Pleases.

Unless Comedy Touches Me As Well As Amuses Me, It Leaves Me With A Sense Of Having Wasted My Evening. I Go To The Theatre To Be Moved To Laughter, Not To Be Tickled Or Bustled Into It.

Financiers Live In A World Of Illusion. They Count On Something Which They Call The Capital Of The Country, Which Has No Existence.

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.

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.

In The Middle Ages People Believed That The Earth Was Flat, For Which They Had At Least The Evidence Of Their Senses: We Believe It To Be Round, Not Because As Many As 1 Percent Of Us Could Give Physical Reasons For So Quaint A Belief, But Because Modern Science Has Convinced Us That Nothing That Is Obvious Is True, And That Everything That Is Magical, Improbable, Extraordinary, Gigantic, Microscopic, Heartless, Or Outrageous Is Scientific.

What We Want Is To See The Child In Pursuit Of Knowledge, And Not Knowledge In Pursuit Of The Child.

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.

The Art Of Government Is The Organization Of Idolatry. The Bureaucracy Consists Of Functionaries; The Aristocracy, Of Idols; The Democracy, Of Idolaters. The Populace Cannot Understand The Bureaucracy: It Can Only Worship The National Idols.

A Native American Elder Once Described His Own Inner Struggles In This Manner: Inside Of Me There Are Two Dogs. One Of The Dogs Is Mean And Evil. The Other Dog Is Good. The Mean Dog Fights The Good Dog All The Time. When Asked Which Dog Wins, He Reflected For A Moment And Replied, The One I Feed The Most.

A Happy Family Is But An Earlier Heaven.

All Professions Are Conspiracies Against The Laity.

Absolute Honesty Is As Absurd An Abstraction As An Absolute Temperature Or An Absolute Value.

Great Art Is Never Produced For Its Own Sake. It Is Too Difficult To Be Worth The Effort.

If More Than 10% Of The People Like A Painting, You Can Be Sure It's Bad.

If You Must Hold Yourself Up To Your Children As An Object Lesson, Hold Yourself Up As A Warning And Not As An Example.

Nothing Remains Beautiful And Interesting Except Thought, Because The Thought Is The Life.

The Function Of Comedy Is To Dispelunconsciousness By Turning The Searchlight Of The Keenest Moral And Intellectual Analysisright On To It.

Eternal Is The Fact That The Human Creature Born In Ireland And Brought Up In Its Air Is Irish. I Have Lived For Twenty Years In Ireland And For Seventy-two In England; But The Twenty Came First And In Britain I Am Still A Foreigner And Shall Die One.

Life Is A Flame That Is Always Burning Itself Out; But It Catches Fire Again Every Time A Child Is Born. Life Is Greater Than Death, And Hope Than Despair.

Wicked People Means People Who Have No Love: Therefore, They Have No Shame. They Have The Power To Ask Love Because The Don't Need It: They Have The Power To Offer It Because They Have None To Give.

I Have Never Admitted The Right Of An Elderly Author To Alter The Work Of A Young Author, Even When The Young Author Happens To Be His Former Self.

To Endure The Pain Of Living, We All Drug Ourselves More Or Less With Gin, With Literature, With Superstitions, With Romance, With Idealism, Political, Sentimental, And Moral, With Every Possible Preparation Of That Universal Hashish: Imagination.

It Is Difficult, If Not Impossible, For Most People To Think Otherwise Than In The Fashion Of Their Own Period.

Dogmatic Toleration Is Nonsense: I Would No More Tolerate The Teaching Of Calvinism To Children If I Had Power To Persecute It Than The British Raj Tolerated Suttee In India. Every Civilized Authority Must Draw A Line Between The Tolerable And The Intolerable.

To A Professional Critic (i Have Been One Myself) Theatre-going Is The Curse Of Adam. The Play Is The Evil He Is Paid To Endure In The Sweat Of His Brow; And The Sooner It Is Over, The Better.

What God Hath Joined Together No Man Shall Put Asunder: God Will Take Care Of That.

You See Things; And You Say, ‘why?’ But I Dream Things That Never Were; And I Say, ‘why Not?

Oh, Come! That Boot Is On The Other Leg. Why Should You Call Me To Account For Eating Decently? If I Battened On The Scorched Corpses Of Animals, You Might Well Ask Me Why I Did That

Vegetarian Diet

To Make Democracy Work, You Need An Aristocratic Democracy. To Make Aristocracy Work, You Need A Democratic Aristocracy.

Only Fools Repeat The Same Things Over And Over, Expecting To Obtain Different Results.

Religion Is A Good Invention In Times Of Stress.

Every Drunken Skipper Trusts To Providence. But One Of The Ways Of Providence With Drunken Skippers Is To Run Them On The Rocks.

As Well Consult A Butcher On The Value Of Vegetarianism As A Doctor On The Worth Of Vaccination.

Nothing Can Save Us From A Perpetual Headlong Fall Into A Bottomless Abyss But A Solid Footing Of Dogma; And We No Sooner Agree To That Than We Find That The Only Trustworthy Dogma Is That There Is No Dogma.

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.

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

Beauty Is All Very Well At First Sight; But Who Ever Looks At It When It Has Been In The House Three Days?

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.

The Philosopher Is Nature's Pilot. And There You Have Our Difference: To Be In Hell Is To Drift: To Be In Heaven Is To Steer.

If You Can't Get Rid Of The Skeleton In Your Closet, You'd Best Teach It To Dance.

There Is No Subject On Which More Dangerous Nonsense Is Talked And Thought Than Marriage.

To Me The Sole Hope Of Human Salvation Lies In Teaching Man To Regard Himself As An Experiment In The Realization Of God, To Regard His Hands As God's Hand, His Brain As God's Brain, His Purpose As God's Purpose. He Must Regard God As A Helpless Longing, Which Longed Him Into Existence By Its Desperate Need For An Executive Organ.

When Your Eyes Are Fixed In The Stare Of Unconsciousness, And Your Throat Coughs The Last Gasping Breath - As One Dragged In The Dark To A Great Precipice - What Assistance Are A Wife And Child?

All My Life Affection Has Been Showered Upon Me, And Every Forward Step I Have Made Has Been Taken In Spite Of It.

If All The Churches Of Europe Closed Their Doors Until The Drums Ceased Rolling They Would Act As A Most Powerful Reminder That Though The Glory Of War Is A Famous And Ancient Glory, It Is Not The Final Glory Of God.

The Indian Way Of Life Provides The Vision Of The Natural, Real Way Of Life. We Veil Ourselves With Unnatural Masks. On The Face Of India Are The Tender Expressions Which Carry The Mark Of The Creators Hand.

It Is Quite Useless To Declare That All Men Are Born Free If You Deny That They Are Born Good . Guarantee A Man's Goodness And His Liberty Will Take Care Of Itself. To Guarantee His Freedom On Condition That You Approve Of His Moral Character Is Formally To Abolish All Freedom Whatsoever, As Every Man's Liberty Is At The Mercy Of A Moral Indictment Which Any Fool Can Trump Up Against Everyone Who Violates Custom, Whether As A Prophet Or As A Rascal.

I Am A Brigand: I Live By Robbing The Rich.' 'i Am A Gentleman: I Live By Robbing The Poor.

The Seven Deadly Sins... Food, Clothing, Firing, Rent, Taxes, Respectability And Children. Nothing Can Lift Those Seven Millstones From Man's Neck But Money; And The Spirit Cannot Soar Until The Millstones Are Lifted.

As 99 Per Cent Of English Authors And 100 Per Cent Of American Ones [authors] Are Just Such Imbeciles, Managers And Publishers Make A Practice Of Asking For Every Right The Author Possesses.

Vivisection Is A Social Evil Because If It Advances Human Knowledge, It Does So At The Expense Of Human Character.

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.

People Who Say It Cannot Be Done Should Not Interrupt Those Who Are Doing It.

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.

God Has Given Us A World That Nothing But Our Own Folly Keeps From Being A Paradise.

To Be A Champion You Must Live Like One.

The Worst Sin Toward Our Fellow Creatures Is Not To Hate Them, But To Be Indifferent To Them: That's The Essence Of Inhumanity.

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.

Animals Are My Friends... And I Don't Eat My Friends.

Virtue Is Insufficient Temptation.

While We Have Prisons It Matters Little Which Of Us Occupy The Cells.

The Average Age (longevity) Of A Meat Eater Is 63. I Am On The Verge Of 85 And Still Work As Hard As Ever. I Have Lived Quite Long Enough And Am Trying To Die; But I Simply Cannot Do It. A Single Beef-steak Would Finish Me; But I Cannot Bring Myself To Swallow It. I Am Oppressed With A Dread Of Living Forever. That Is The Only Disadvantage Of Vegetarianism.

Funny Inspirational

An Englishman Thinks He Is Moral When He Is Only Uncomfortable.

The Salvation Of The World Depends On The Men Who Will Not Take Evil Good-humouredly, And Whose Laughter Destroys The Fool Instead Of Encouraging Him.

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

The Great Advantage Of A Hotel Is That It Is A Refuge From Home Life.

Heaven, As Conventionally Conceived, Is A Place So Inane, So Dull, So Useless, So Miserable That Nobody Has Ever Ventured To Describe A Whole Day In Heaven, Though Plenty Of People Have Described A Day At The Seaside.

If You Don't Begin To Be A Revolutionist At The Age Of Twenty, Then At Fifty You Will Be A Most Impossible Old Fossil. If You Area Red Revolutionary At The Age Of Twenty, You Have Some Chance Of Being Up-to-date When You Are Forty!

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.

The Sound Body Is The Product Of The Sound Mind.

Somemenare Bornkings; And Someare Bornstatesmen. The Two Are Seldom The Same.

There Have Been Summits Of Civilization At Which Heretics Like Socrates , Who Was Killed Because He Was Wiser Than His Neighbors, Have Not Been Tortured, But Ordered To Kill Themselves In The Most Painless Manner Known To Their Judges. But From That Summit There Was A Speedy Relapse Into Our Present Savagery.

Higgins. Have You No Morals, Man? Doolittle [unabashed] Cant Afford Them, Governor. Neither Could You If You Was As Poor As Me.

All Roads End At The Grave, Which Is The Gate To Nothingness.

You Can Be A Thorough-going Neo-darwinian Without Imagination, Metaphysics, Poetry, Conscience, Or Decency. For 'natural Selection' Has No Moral Significance: It Deals With That Part Of Evolution Which Has No Purpose, No Intelligence, And Might More Appropriately Be Called Accidental Selection, Or Better Still, Unnatural Selection, Since Nothing Is More Unnatural Than An Accident. If It Could Be Proved That The Whole Universe Had Been Produced By Such Selection, Only Fools And Rascals Could Bear To Live.

The Longer I Live, The More I Realize That I Am Never Wrong About Anything, And That All The Pains I Have So Humbly Taken To Verify My Notions Have Only Wasted My Time!

Christmas Is Forced Upon A Reluctant And Disgusted Nation By The Shopkeepers And The Press; On Its Own Merits It Would Wither And Shrivel In The Fiery Breath Of Universal Hatred.

A Little Learning Is A Dangerous Thing, But We Must Take That Risk Because A Little Is As Much As Our Biggest Heads Can Hold.

Every Doctor Will Allow A Colleague To Decimate A Whole Countryside Sooner Than Violate The Bond Of Professional Etiquette By Giving Him Away.

Not Everybody Is Strong Enough To Endure Life Without An Anesthetic. Drink Probably Averts More Gross Crime Than It Causes.

Fashions Are The Only Induced Epidemics, Proving That Epidemics Can Be Induced By Tradesmen.

As An Old Soldier, I Admit The Cowardice: It's As Universal As Seasickness, And Matters Just As Little.

Life's No Brief Candle-it's A Splendid Torch!

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

Death And Dying

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

The Anti-vivisector Does Not Deny That Physiologists Must Make Experiments And Even Take Chances With New Methods. He Says That They Must Not Seek Knowledge By Criminal Methods, Just As They Must Not Make Money By Criminal Methods. He Does Not Object To Galileo Dropping Cannon Balls From The Top Of The Leaning Tower Of Pisa; But He Would Object To Shoving Off Two Dogs Or American Tourists.

A Tranquil Woman Can Go On Sewing Longer Than An Angry Man Can Go On Fuming.

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

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

I Am A Sort Of Collector Of Religions: And The Curious Thing Is That I Find I Can Believe In Them All.

A Man Of Genius Is Not A Man Who Sees More Than Other Men Do. On The Contrary, It Is Very Often Found That He Is Absentminded Andobserves Much Less Than Other People.... Why Is It That The Public Have Such An Exaggerated Respect For Him--after He Is Dead? The Reason Is That The Man Of Genius Understands The Importance Of The Few Things He Sees.

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

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.

I Dread Success. To Have Succeeded Is To Have Finished One's Business On Earth, Like The Male Spider Who Is Killed By The Female The Moment He Has Succeeded In His Courtship. I Like The State Of Continual Becoming, With A Goal In Front And Not Behind.

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.

A Man's Interest In The World Is Only An Overflow From His Interest In Himself.

The Business Man - The Man To Whom Age Brings Golf Instead Of Wisdom.

If You Leave The Smallest Corner Of Your Head Vacant For A Moment, Other People's Opinions Will Rush In From All Quarters.

What A Heartbreaking Job It Is Trying To Combine Authors For Their Own Protection... The First Lesson I Learned Was That When You Take The Field For The Authors You Will Be Safer Without A Breastplate Than Without A Backplate.

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.

Nationalism Must Now Be Added To The Refuse Pile Of Superstitions. We Are Now Citizens Of The World, And The Man Who Divides The Race Into Elect Irishmen And Reprobate Foreign Devils (especially Englishmen) Had Better Live On The Blaskets Where He Can Admire Himself Without Disturbance.

Anarchism Is A Game At Which The Police Can Beat You.

Just As I Cannot Remember Any Time When I Could Not Read And Write, I Cannot Remember Any Time When I Did Not Exercise My Imagination In Daydreams About Women.

Man Is The Only Animal Of Which I Am Thoroughly And Cravenly Afraid...there Is No Harm In A Well-fed Lion. It Has No Ideals, No Sect, No Party.

People Must Not Be Forced To Adopt Me As Their Favourite Author, Even For Their Own Good.

Unless The People Can Choose Their Leaders And Rulers, And Can Revoke Their Choice At Intervals Long Enough To Test Their Measuresby Results, The Government Will Be A Tyranny Exercised In The Interests Of Whatever Classes Or Castes Or Mobs Or Cliques Have This Choice.

Never Forget That If You Leave Your Law To Judges And Your Religion To Bishops, You Will Presently Find Yourself Without Either Law Or Religion.

Finding Yourself

A Gentleman Is One Who Puts More Into The World Than He Takes Out.

Personal Growth

I Would Like To Take You Seriously, But To Do So Would Be An Affront To Your Intelligence.

The Policy Of Letting Things Alone, In The Practical Sense That The Government Should Never Interfere With Business Or Go Into Business Itself, Is Called Laisser-faire By Economists And Politicians. It Has Broken Down So Completely In Practice That It Is Now Discredited; But It Was All The Fashion In Politics A Hundred Years Ago, And Is Still Influentially Advocated By Men Of Business And Their Backers Who Naturally Would Like To Be Allowed To Make Money As They Please Without Regard To The Interest Of The Public.

I Claim To Be A Conscientiously Immoral Writer.

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

Virtue Consists, Not In Abstaining From Vice, But In Not Desiring It.

The Man Who Writes About Himself And His Own Time Is The Only Man Who Writes About All People And About All Time.

Whenever I See The Word Operation, Especially Trifling Operation, I At Once Write Off The Patient As Dead.

As Long As I Have A Want, I Have A Reason For Living. Satisfaction Is Death.

The Body Was The Slave Of The Vortex; But The Slave Has Become The Master; And We Must Free Ourselves From That Tyranny. It Is This Stuff [ Indicating Her Body ], This Flesh And Blood And Bone And All The Rest Of It, That Is Intolerable. Even Prehistoric Man Dreamed Of What He Called An Astral Body, And Asked Who Would Deliver Him From The Body Of This Death.

The Domestic Career Is No More Natural To All Women Than The Military Career Is Natural To All Men.

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

I Love Little Children Too But I Don't Cut Off Their Heads And Stick Them In Vases.

We Learn From Experience That Men Never Learn Anything From Experience.

No Man Ever Believes That The Bible Means What It Says: He Is Always Convinced That It Says What He Means.

Spend All You Have Before You Die, And Do Not Outlive Yourself.

Why Should We Take Advice On Sex From The Pope? If He Knows Anything About It, He Shouldn't!

A Newspaper, Not Having To Act On Its Descriptions And Reports, But Only To Sell Them To Idly Curious People, Has Nothing But Honor To Lose By Inaccuracy And Non-veracity.

An Irishman's Imagination Never Lets Him Alone, Never Convinces Him, Never Satisfies Him; But It Makes Him That He Can't Face Reality Nor Deal With It Nor Handle It Nor Conquer It: He Can Only Sneer At Them That Do, And Be 'agreeable To Strangers', Like A Good-for-nothing Woman On The Streets.

Assasination On The Scaffold Is The Worst Form Of Assasination, Because There It Is Invested With The Approval Of Society.

Would The World Ever Have Been Made If Its Maker Had Been Afraid Of Making Trouble?making Life Means Making Trouble. There’s Only One Way Of Escaping Trouble; And That’s Killing Things.

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

The Surest Way To Ruin A Man Who Doesn't Know How To Handle Money Is To Give Him Some.

I Choose Not To Make A Graveyard Of My Body For The Rotting Corpses Of Dead Animals.

Very Few People Can Afford To Be Poor.

The Most Tragic Thing In The World Is A Man Of Genius Who Is Not A Man Of Honor.

We Learn From History That We Learn Nothing From History.

After All, The Wrong Road Always Leads Somewhere.

For The Pre-darwinian Age Had Come To Be Regarded As A Dark Age In Which Men Still Believed That The Book Of Genesis Was A Standard Scientific Treatise, And That The Only Additions To It Were Galileo'a Demonstration Of Leonardo Da Vinci's Simple Remark That The Earth Is A Moon Of The Sun, Sir Humphrey Davy's Invention Of The Safety Lamp, The Discovery Of Electricity, The Application Of Steam To Industrial Purposes, And The Penny Post.

Until The Men Of Action Clear Out The Talkers We Who Have Social Consciences Are At The Mercy Of Those Who Have None.

Our Necessities Are Few, But Our Wants Are Endless.

Life Levels All Men. Death Reveals The Eminent.

When Two People Are Under The Influence Of The Most Violent, Most Insane, Most Delusive, And Most Transient Of Passions, They Are Required To Swear That They Will Remain In That Excited, Abnormal, And Exhausting Condition Continuously Until Death Do Them Part.

Obedience Simulates Subordination As Fear Of The Police Simulates Honesty.

In An Article On Bunyan Lately Published In The "contemporary Review" - The Only Article On The Subject Worth Reading On The Subject I Ever Saw (yes, Thank You, I Am Familiar With Macaulay's Patronizing Prattle About "the Pilgrim's Progress") Etc.

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

What Is The Use Of Straining After An Amiable View Of Things, When A Cynical View Is Most Likely To Be The True One?.

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?

Never Believe Anything A Writer Tells You About Himself. A Man Comes To Believe In The End The Lies He Tells Himself About Himself.

The Technical History Of Modern Harmony Is A History Of Growth Of Toleration By The Human Ear Of Chords That At First Sounded Discordant And Senseless To The Main Body Of Contemporary Professional Musicians.

A Day's Work Is A Day's Work, Neither More Nor Less, And The Man Or Woman Who Does It Needs A Day's Sustenance, A Night's Repose And Due Leisure, Whether They Be Painter Or Ploughman.

My Friend, When A Man Has Anything To Tell In This World, The Difficulty Is Not To Make Him Tell It, But To Prevent Him From Telling It Too Often.

You Cannot Have Power For Good Without Having Power For Evil Too. Even Mother's Milk Nourishes Murderers As Well As Heroes.

Dancing Is A Perpendicular Expression Of A Horizontal Desire.

Everybody Who Does Not Live In A Prostitute's Bed And On A Diet Of Cocaine Snow Is Called An Ascetic Nowadays.

A True Artist Will Let His Wife Starve, His Children Go Barefoot, His Mother Drudge For His Living At Seventy, Sooner Than Work At Anything But His Art.

The Best Bought-up Children Are Those Who Have Seen Thier Parents As They Are. Hypocrisy Is Not The First Duty Of A Parent.

We Must Reform Society Before We Can Reform Ourselves.

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

A Miracle, My Friend, Is An Event Which Creates Faith.

Always Strive To Find Out What To Do By Thinking, Without Asking Anybody. If You Continually Do This, You Will Soon Act Like A Grown-up Woman. For Want Of Doing This, A Very Great Number Of Grown-up People Act Like Children.

I Don't Like The Idea Of Killing My Fellow Creatures In Order To Eat Their Dead Bodies.

The Criminal Law Is No Use To Decent People.

The Quality Of A Play Is The Quality Of Its Ideas.

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

Positive Thinking

Nothing Makes A Man So Selfish As Work.

An Idea That No One Believes Can Not Be Proved Too Often.

This Is The True Joy Of Life-the Being Used For A Purpose Recognized By Yourself As A Mighty One, The Being Thoroughly Worn Out Before You Are Thrown To The Scrap-heap; The Being A Force Of Nature Instead Of A Feverish, Selfish Clod Of Ailments And Grievances.

What Is Wrong With Priests And Popes Is That Instead Of Being Apostles And Saints, They Are Nothing But Empirics Who Say I Know Instead Of I Am Learning, And Pray For Credulity And Inertia As Wise Men Pray For Skepticism And Activity.

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.

The Law Is Equal Before All Of Us; But We Are Not All Equal Before The Law. Virtually There Is One Law For The Rich And Another For The Poor, One Law For The Cunning And Another For The Simple, One Law For The Forceful And Another For The Feeble, One Law For The Ignorant And Another For The Learned, One Law For The Brave And Another For The Timid, And Within Family Limits One Law For The Parent And No Law At All For The Child.

A Family Is A Tyranny Ruled Over By It's Weakest Member.

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