Assassination is the extreme form of censorship. |
Few people think more than two or three times a year; I have made an international reputation for myself by thinking once or twice a week. |
Hegel was right when he said that we learn from history that man can never learn anything from history. |
I can forgive Alfred Nobel for having invented dynamite, but only a fiend in human form could have invented the Nobel Prize. |
If all economists were laid end to end, they would not reach a conclusion. |
If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance. |
Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine and at last you create what you will. |
It is dangerous to be sincere unless you are also stupid. |
It is the deed that teaches, not the name we give it. Murder and capital punishment are not opposites that cancel one another, but similars that breed their own kind. |
Martyrdom is the only way a person can become famous without ability. |
My method is to take the utmost trouble to find the right thing to say, and then to say it with the utmost levity. |
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. |
One man that has a mind and knows it can always beat ten men who haven't and don't. |
The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one. |
The more things a man is ashamed of, the more respectable he is. |
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man. |
There are no secrets better kept than the secrets that everybody guesses. |
This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being a force of nature instead of a feverish selfish clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. 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. I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work, the more I live. I rejoice in life for it's own sake. Life is no "brief candle" to me. It is sort of a splendid torch which I have a hold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it over to future generations. |
We don't bother much about dress and manners in England, because as a nation we don't dress well and we've no manners. |
When a thing is funny, search it carefully for a hidden truth. |
