Popularity: -1
Vote:   | A broken heart is a very pleasant complaint for a man in London if he has a comfortable income. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | A drama critic is a man who leaves no turn unstoned. |
Popularity: 4
Vote: | A fashion is nothing but an induced epidemic. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | A fool's brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence University education. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | A genius can't be forced; nor can you make an ape an alderman. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | A government that robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | A happy family is but an earlier heaven. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing. |
Popularity: -3
Vote: | 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. |
Popularity: -5
Vote: | A man never tells you anything until you contradict him. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | A man of great common sense and good taste - meaning thereby a man without originality or moral courage. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | A mind of the calibre of mine cannot derive its nutriment from cows. |
Popularity: -3
Vote: | 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." |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | A perpetual holiday is a good working definition of hell. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | Alcohol is the anesthesia by which we endure the operation of life. |
Popularity: -3
Vote: | All censorships exist to prevent any one from challenging current conceptions and existing institutions. All progress is initiated by challenging current conceptions, and executed by supplanting existing institutions. Consequently the first condition of progress is the removal of censorships. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | All great truths begin as blasphemies. |
Popularity: -3
Vote: | All my life affection has been showered upon me, and every forward step I have made has been taken in spite of it. |
Popularity: 4
Vote: | Am reserving two tickets for you for my premiere. Come and bring a friend - if you have one. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | Americans adore me and will go on adoring me until I say something nice about them. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | An asylum for the sane would be empty in America. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | An election is a moral horror, as bad as a battle except for the blood; a mud bath for every soul concerned in it. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | An Englishman thinks he is moral when he is only uncomfortable. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | An index is a great leveller. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | Animals are my friends... and I don't eat my friends. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | As well consult a butcher on the value of vegetarianism as a doctor on the worth of vaccination. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | Assassination is the extreme form of censorship. |
Popularity: -2
Vote: | At present, intelligent people do not have their children vaccinated, nor does the law now compel them to. The result is not, as the Jennerians prophesied, the extermination of the human race by smallpox; on the contrary more people are now killed by vaccination than by smallpox. |
Popularity: -5
Vote: | Baseball has the great advantage over cricket of being sooner ended. |
Popularity: -2
Vote: | Beauty is a short-lived tyranny. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | Beauty is all very well at first sight; but who ever looks at it when it has been in the house three days? |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | Better keep yourself clean and bright; you are the window through which you must see the world. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | Beware of false knowledge; it is more dangerous than ignorance. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | Beware of the man who does not return your blow: he neither forgives you nor allows you to forgive yourself. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | Capitalism has destroyed our belief in any effective power but that of self interest backed by force. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | Censorship ends in logical completeness when nobody is allowed to read any books except the books that nobody reads. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | Choose silence of all virtues, for by it you hear other men's imperfections, and conceal your own. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | Clever and attractive women do not want to vote; they are willing to let men govern as long as they govern men. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | Crude classifications and false generalizations are the curse of organized life. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | Cruelty must be whitewashed by a moral excuse, and pretense of reluctance. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | Cruelty would be delicious if one could only find some sort of cruelty that didn't really hurt. |
Popularity: -6
Vote: | Dancing is a perpendicular expression of a horizontal desire. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | Democracy is a device that insures we shall be governed no better than we deserve. |
Popularity: 7
Vote: | Democracy is a form of government that substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | Democracy substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | Disobedience, the rarest and most courageous of the virtues, is seldom distinguished from neglect, the laziest and commonest of the vices. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | Do not do unto others as you expect they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same. |
Popularity: -9
Vote: | Do not try to live forever. You will not succeed. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | 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. |
Popularity: -8
Vote: | 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. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | Dying is a troublesome business: there is pain to be suffered, and it wrings one's heart; but death is a splendid thing - a warfare accomplished, a beginning all over again, a triumph. You can always see that in their faces. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | England and America are two countries separated by the same language. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | Every man over forty is a scoundrel. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | Every person who has mastered a profession is a skeptic concerning it. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | Everything happens to everybody sooner or later if there is time enough. |
Popularity: -6
Vote: | Except during the nine months before he draws his first breath, no man manages his affairs as well as a tree does. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | Fashions are the only induced epidemics, proving that epidemics can be induced by tradesmen. |
Popularity: -3
Vote: | Fashions, after all, are only induced epidemics. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | Few of us have vitality enough to make any of our instincts imperious. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | 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. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | Find enough clever things to say, and you're a Prime Minister; write them down and you're a Shakespeare. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | First love is only a little foolishness and a lot of curiosity. |
Popularity: 4
Vote: | Forgive him, for he believes that the customs of his tribe are the laws of nature! |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | General consultant to mankind. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | Give a man health and a course to steer, and he'll never stop to trouble about whether he's happy or not. |
Popularity: -4
Vote: | Go anywhere in England where there are natural wholesome, contented and really nice English people; and what do you find? That the stables are the real centre of the household. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | Go on writing plays, my boy, One of these days one of these London producers will go into his office and say to his secretary, "Is there a play from Shaw this morning?" and when she says, "No," he will say, "Well, then we'll have to start on the rubbish." And that's your chance, my boy. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | Hatred is the coward's revenge for being intimidated. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | He didn't dare to, because his father had a weak heart and habitually threatened to drop dead if anybody hurt his feelings. You may have noticed that people with weak hearts are the tyrants of English married life. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | He knows nothing and thinks he knows everything. That points clearly to a political career. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches. |
Popularity: -2
Vote: | He's a man of great common sense and good taste - meaning thereby a man without originality or moral courage. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | Hegel was right when he said that we learn from history that man can never learn anything from history. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | Hell is full of musical amateurs. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | 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. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | Home life is no more natural to us than a cage is natural to a cockatoo. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | How can what an Englishman believes be hearsay? It is a contradiction in terms. |
Popularity: -2
Vote: | I absolutely forbid any such outrage. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | 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. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | I believe in Michelangelo, Velasquez, and Rembrandt; in the might of design, the mystery of color, the redemption of all things by Beauty everlasting, and the message of Art that has made these hands blessed. Amen. Amen. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | I can forgive Alfred Nobel for having invented dynamite, but only a fiend in human form could have invented the Nobel Prize. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | I dislike feeling at home when I am abroad. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | I don't believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and if they can't find them, make them. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | 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 a state of continual becoming, with a goal in front and not behind. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | I enjoy convalescence. It is the part that makes the illness worth while. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | I hate performers who debase great works of art; I long for their annihilation. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | I hope you have lost your good looks, for while they last any fool can adore you, and the adoration of fools is bad for the soul. No, give me a ruined complexion and a lost figure and sixteen chins on a farmyard of Crow's feet and an obvious wig. Then you shall see me coming out strong. |
Popularity: -3
Vote: | I learned long ago, never to wrestle with a pig. You get dirty, and besides, the pig likes it. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | I never resist temptation, because I have found that things that are bad for me do not tempt me. |
Popularity: -3
Vote: | I never thought much of the courage of a lion tamer. Inside the cage he is at least safe from people. |
Popularity: -2
Vote: | I often quote myself. It adds spice to my conversation. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | I want to be all used up when I die. |
Popularity: -2
Vote: | I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | I'm an atheist and I thank God for it. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | I'm not a teacher: only a fellow-traveller of whom you asked the way. I pointed ahead - ahead of myself as well as you. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | I'm only a beer teetotaller, not a champagne teetotaller. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | I've posed nude for a photographer in the manner of Rodin's Thinker, but I merely looked constipated. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | If all the economists were laid end to end, they'd never reach a conclusion. |
Popularity: -4
Vote: | If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | If parents would only realize how they bore their children! |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | If Pygmalion is not good enough for your friends with its own verbal music, their talent must be altogether extraordinary. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | If you can say a thing with one stroke, unanswerably you have style; if not, you are at best a marchande de plaisir; a decorative litterateur, or a musical confectioner, or a painter of fans with cupids and cocottes. Handel had power. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | If you can't get rid of the skeleton in your closet, you'd best teach it to dance. |
Popularity: -5
Vote: | If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance. |
Popularity: -5
Vote: | If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | If you injure your neighbour, better not do it by halves. |
Popularity: -2
Vote: | If you must hold yourself up to your children as an object lesson, hold yourself up as a warning and not as an example. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | If you strike a child take care that you strike it in anger, even at the risk of maiming it for life. A blow in cold blood neither can nor should be forgiven. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine and at last you create what you will. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | In a battle all you need to make you fight is a little hot blood and the knowledge that it's more dangerous to lose than to win. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | In heaven an angel is nobody in particular. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | In this world there is always danger for those who are afraid of it. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | In your Salvation shelter I saw poverty, misery, cold and hunger. You gave them bread and treacle and dreams of heaven. I give from thirty shillings a week to twelve thousand a year. They find their own dreams; but I look after the drainage. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | Independence? That's middle class blasphemy. We are all dependent on one another, every soul of us on earth. |
Popularity: -2
Vote: | It is a curious sensation: the sort of pain that goes mercifully beyond our powers of feeling. When your heart is broken, your boats are burned: nothing matters any more. It is the end of happiness and the beginning of peace. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | 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. |
Popularity: 4
Vote: | It is dangerous to be sincere unless you are also stupid. |
Popularity: -2
Vote: | It is fortunate to come of distinguished ancestry. - It is not less so to be such that people do not care to inquire whether you are of high descent or not. |
Popularity: 5
Vote: | It is most unwise for people in love to marry. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | It is the mark of a truly intelligent person to be moved by statistics. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | It was from Handel that I learned that style consists in force of assertion. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | It's so hard to know what to do when one wishes earnestly to do right. |
Popularity: -4
Vote: | Lack of money is the root of all evil. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | Let a short Act of Parliament be passed, placing all street musicians outside the protection of the law, so that any citizen may assail them with stones, sticks, knives, pistols or bombs without incurring any penalties. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it. |
Popularity: -3
Vote: | Life contains but two tragedies. One is not to get your heart's desire; the other is to get it. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | Life is no brief candle to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got a hold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it onto future generations. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | Life isn't about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | Life levels all men. Death reveals the eminent. |
Popularity: -4
Vote: | 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. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | Love is a gross exaggeration of the difference between one person and everybody else. |
Popularity: -2
Vote: | Man can climb to the highest summits, but he cannot dwell there long. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | Man gives every reason for his conduct save one, every excuse for his crimes save one, every plea for his safety save one; and that one is his cowardice. |
Popularity: -4
Vote: | Marriage is an alliance entered into by a man who can't sleep with the window shut, and a woman who can't sleep with the window open. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | Martyrdom: The only way a man can become famous without ability. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | Men are wise in proportion, not to their experience, but to their capacity for experience. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | Men have to do some awfully mean things to keep up their respectability. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | Miracles, in the sense of phenomena we cannot explain, surround us on every hand: life itself is the miracle of miracles. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | Money is the most important thing in the world. It represents health, strength, honor, generosity and beauty as conspicuously as the want of it represents illness, weakness, disgrace, meanness and ugliness. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | Most people do not pray; they only beg. |
Popularity: -2
Vote: | My main reason for adopting literature as a profession was that, as the author is never seen by his clients, he need not dress respectably. |
Popularity: -4
Vote: | My reputation grows with every failure. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | Never fret for an only son, the idea of failure will never occur to him. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | Never waste jealousy on a real man: it is the imaginary man that supplants us all in the long run. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | New opinions often appear first as jokes and fancies, then as blasphemies and treason, then as questions open to discussion, and finally as established truths. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | No diet will remove all the fat from your body because the brain is entirely fat. Without a brain, you might look good, but all you could do is run for public office. |
Popularity: -3
Vote: | No man ever believes that the Bible means what it says: He is always convinced that it says what he means. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | No man who is occupied in doing a very difficult thing, and doing it very well, ever loses his self-respect. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | No question is so difficult to answer as that to which the answer is obvious. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | Nothing is ever done in this world until men are prepared to kill one another if it is not done. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | Nothing is worth doing unless the consequences may be serious. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | Oh, the tiger will love you. There is no sincerer love than the love of food. |
Popularity: -2
Vote: | Only Lawyers and mental defectives are automatically exempt for jury duty. |
Popularity: -5
Vote: | Only on paper has humanity yet achieved glory, beauty, truth, knowledge, virtue, and abiding love. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | 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. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | Parentage is a very important profession, but no test of fitness for it is ever imposed in the interest of the children. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it. |
Popularity: 4
Vote: | Peace is not only better than war, but infinitely more arduous. |
Popularity: -4
Vote: | People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don't believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and, if they can't find them, make them. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | People become attached to their burdens sometimes more than the burdens are attached to them. |
Popularity: -8
Vote: | People who say it cannot be done should not interrupt those who are doing it. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | Perhaps the greatest social service that can be rendered by anybody to the country and to mankind is to bring up a family. |
Popularity: -4
Vote: | Political necessities sometime turn out to be political mistakes. |
Popularity: -3
Vote: | Power does not corrupt men; fools, however, if they get into a position of power, corrupt power. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | Power is the faculty or capacity to act, the strength and potency to accomplish something. It is the vital energy to make choices and decisions. It also includes the capacity to overcome deeply embedded habits and to cultivate higher, more effective ones. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | Property is organized robbery. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | Reading made Don Quixote a gentleman, but believing what he read made him mad. |
Popularity: -2
Vote: | Reasonable people adapt themselves to the world. Unreasonable people attempt to adapt the world to themselves. All progress, therefore, depends on unreasonable people. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | Science never solves a problem without creating ten more. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | Self-sacrifice enables us to sacrifice other people without blushing. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | She had lost the art of conversation but not, unfortunately, the power of speech. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | Silence is the most perfect expression of scorn. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | Socialism is the same as Communism, only better English. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | Some look at things that are, and ask why. I dream of things that never were and ask why not? |
Popularity: -2
Vote: | Statistics show that of those who contract the habit of eating, very few survive. |
Popularity: -4
Vote: | Success does not consist in never making mistakes but in never making the same one a second time. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | Syllables govern the world. |
Popularity: -2
Vote: | Take care to get what you like or you will be forced to like what you get. |
Popularity: 7
Vote: | 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. |
Popularity: -2
Vote: | The art of government is the organisation of idolatry. |
Popularity: 4
Vote: | The best place to find God is in a garden. You can dig for him there. |
Popularity: -3
Vote: | The British soldier can stand up to anything except the British War Office. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | 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. |
Popularity: -4
Vote: | The faults of the burglar are the qualities of the financier. |
Popularity: -3
Vote: | The fickleness of the women I love is only equalled by the infernal constancy of the women who love me. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | The first condition of progress is the removal of censorship. |
Popularity: -4
Vote: | The golden rule is that there are no golden rules. |
Popularity: -3
Vote: | The great advantage of a hotel is that it is a refuge from home life. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | 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. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | The great secret, Eliza, is not having bad manners or good manners or any other particular sort of manners, but having the same manner for all human souls: in short, behaving as if you were in Heaven, where there are no third-class carriages, and one soul is as good as another. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | The liar's punishment is not in the least that he is not believed, but that he cannot believe anyone else. |