An election is a moral horror, as bad as a battle except for blood; a mud bath for every soul concerned in it. |
The worst sin toward our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them: that's the essense of inhumanity. |
If you do not say a thing in an irritating way, you may as well not say it at all because people will not trouble themselves about anything that does not trouble them. |
All great truths began as blasphemies. |
The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it. |
A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing. |
Lack of money is the root of all evil. |
Democracy is a device that ensures we shall be governed no better than we deserve. |
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. |
Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it. |
Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything. |
Socialism means equality of income or nothing... under socialism you would not be allowed to be poor. You would be forcibly fed, clothed, lodged, taught, and employed whether you like it or not. If it were discovered that you had not character enough to be worth all this trouble, you might possibly be executed in a kindly manner; but whilst you were permitted to live you would have to live well. |
I also made it quite clear that Socialism means equality of income or nothing, and that under socialism you would not be allowed to be poor. You would be forcibly fed, clothed, lodged, taught, and employed whether you like it or not. If it were discovered that you had not character enough to be worth all this trouble, you might possibly be executed in a kindly manner; but whilst you were permitted to live you would have to live well. |
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. |
Imprisonment, as it exists today, is a worse crime than any of those committed by its victims. |
The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact than a drunken man is happier than a sober one. |
The right to know is like the right to live. It is fundamental and unconditional in its assumption that knowledge, like life, is a desirable thing. |
The more things a man is ashamed of, the more respectable he is. |
A fashion is nothing but an induced epidemic. |
A lifetime of happiness! No man alive could bear it: it would be hell on earth. |
