"Every fool believes what his teachers tell him, and calls his credulity science or morality as confidently as his father called it divine revelation."

"The best brought-up children are those who have seen their parents as they are. Hypocrisy is not the parent's first duty."

"A fool's brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry."

"Where equality is undisputed, so also is subordination."

"The duke inquires contemptuously whether his gamekeeper is the equal of the Astronomer Royal; but he insists that they shall both be hanged equally if they murder him."

"Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it."

"He who confuses political liberty with freedom and political equality with similarity has never thought for five minutes about either."

"Democracy substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few."

"If the lesser mind could measure the greater as a foot-rule can measure a pyramid, there would be finality in universal suffrage. As it is, the political problem remains unsolved."

"Do not do unto others as you would expect they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same."

"Economy is the art of making the most of life. The love of economy is the root of all virtue."

"The confusion of marriage with morality has done more to destroy the conscience of the human race than any other single error."

"The only man I know who behaves sensibly is my tailor; he takes my measurements anew each time he sees me. The rest go on with their old measurements and expect me to fit them."

"There is no love sincerer than the love of food."

"This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap heap; the being a force of Nature instead of a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy."

"Even the youngest of us may be wrong sometimes."

"Geniuses are horrid, intolerant, easily offended, sleeplessly self-conscious men, who expect their wives to be angels with no further business in life than to pet and worship their husbands. Even at the best they are not comfortable men to live with; and a perfect husband is one who is perfectly comfortable to live with."

"The old Whigs and new Tories of the school of Cobden and Bright, the "Philosophic Radicals," the economists of whom Bastiat is the type, Lord Wemyss and Lord Bramwell, Mr. Herbert Spencer and Mr. Auberon Herbert, Mr. Gladstone, Mr. Arthur Balfour, Mr. John Morley, Mr. Leonard Courtney: any of these is, in England, a more typical Anarchist than Bakounin. They distrust State action, and are jealous advocates of the prerogative of the individual, proposing to restrict the one and to extend the other as far as is humanly possible, in opposition to the Social-Democrat, who proposes to democratize the State and throw upon it the whole work of organizing the national industry, thereby making it the most vital organ in the social body."

"Composers are not human; They can live on diminished sevenths, and be contented with a pianoforte for a wife, and a string quartet for a family."

"A man's own self is the last person to believe in him, and is harder to cheat than the rest of the world."

"I hate singers, a miserable crew who think that music exists only in their own throats."

"Perhaps woman's art is of woman's life a thing apart, 'tis man's whole existence; just as love is said to be the reverse — though it isn't."

"If you leave your art, the world will beat you back to it. The world has not an ambition worth sharing, or a prize worth handling. Corrupt successes, disgraceful failures, or sheeplike vegetation are all it has to offer. I prefer Art, which gives me a sixth sense of beauty, with self-respect: perhaps also an immortal reputation in return for honest endeavour in a labour of love."

"All very fine, Mary; but my old-fashioned common sense is better than your clever modern nonsense."

"There are some men who are considered quite ugly, but who are more remarkable than pretty people. You often see that in artists."

"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."

"The way to deal with worldly people is to frighten them by repeating their scandalous whisperings aloud."

"This craving for bouquets by Jews is a symptom of racial degeneration. The Jews are worse than my own people. Those Jews who still want to be the chosen race (chosen by the late Lord Balfour) can go to Palestine and stew in their own juice. The rest had better stop being Jews and start being human beings."

"This is the real enemy, the invader from the East, the Druze, the ruffian, the oriental parasite; in a word: the Jew."

"Assassination is the extreme form of censorship; and it seems hard to justify an incitement to it on anti-censorial principles."

"To understand a saint, you must hear the devil's advocate; and the same is true of the artist."

"[Chess] is a foolish expedient for making idle people believe they are doing something very clever, when they are only wasting their time."

"You must not suppose, because I am a man of letters, that I never tried to earn an honest living."

"I was a cannibal for twenty-five years. For the rest I have been a vegetarian. It was Shelley who first opened my eyes to the savagery of my diet."

"Martyrdom, sir, is what these people like: it is the only way in which a man can become famous without ability."

"I delight in the war more & more. It has waked up the country out of its filthy wallowing in money (blood is a far superior bath); and it has put a fourpence on the Income Tax which will never come off it if the Fabian can help it; so that Old Age Pensions will be within reach at the end of the ten years repayment period, if not sooner. ... Charrington calls me a Tory because I declare for Imperialism as our social theory."

"You cannot have power for good without having power for evil too. Even mother's milk nourishes murderers as well as heroes."

"I can't talk religion to a man with bodily hunger in his eyes."

"Society, with all its prisons and bayonets and whips and ostracisms and starvations, is powerless in the face of the Anarchist who is prepared to sacrifice his own life in the battle with it. Our natural safety from the cheap and devastating explosives which every Russian student can make ... lies in the fact that brave and resolute men, when they are rascals, will not risk their skins for the good of humanity, and, when they are sympathetic enough to care for humanity, abhor murder, and never commit it until their consciences are outraged beyond endurance. The remedy is, then, simply not to outrage their consciences."

"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."

"The faults of the burglar are the qualities of the financier: the manners and habits of a duke would cost a city clerk his situation."

"The greatest of evils and the worst of crimes is poverty."

"I exclude the hypothesis of complete originality on [Charles] Lever's part, because a man can no more be completely original in that sense than a tree can grow out of air."

"If you begin by sacrificing yourself to those you love, you will end by hating those to whom you have sacrificed yourself."

"When a heretic wishes to avoid martyrdom he speaks of "Orthodoxy, True and False" and demonstrates that the True is his heresy."

"Those who understand evil pardon it."

"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."

"Youth, which is forgiven everything, forgives itself nothing: age, which forgives itself everything, is forgiven nothing."