Academics From Ireland

"I aint such a mug as to put up my children to all I know myself."

"I ask you, what am I? I'm one of the undeserving poor: thats what I am. Think of what that means to a man."

"I don't want to talk grammar, I want to talk like a lady."

"I wouldn't have ate it, only I'm too lady-like to take it out of my mouth."

"What is life but a series of inspired follies? The difficulty is to find them to do. Never lose a chance: it doesn't come every day."

"Women upset everything. When you let them into your life, you find that the woman is driving at one thing and you're driving at another."

"Ah-ah-ah-ah-ow-ow-oo-oo!!! I ain't dirty: I washed me face and hands afore I come, I did!"

"He ain't a copper just look at 'is boots!"

"The English have no respect for their language, and will not teach their children to speak it."

"It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman hate or despise him."

"Use your health, even to the point of wearing it out. That is what it is for. Spend all you have before you die; and do not outlive yourself."

"Chloroform has done a lot of mischief. It's enabled every fool to be a surgeon."

"Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh."

"I don't believe in morality. I'm a disciple of Bernard Shaw."

"All professions are conspiracies against the laity."

"Attention and activity lead to mistakes as well as to successes; but a life spent in making mistakes is not only more honorable but more useful than a life spent doing nothing."

"No man who is occupied in doing a very difficult thing, and doing it well, ever loses his self-respect."

"Do not try to live for ever. You will not succeed."

"The secret of being miserable is to have leisure to bother about whether you are happy or not. The cure for it is occupation, because occupation means pre-occupation; and the pre-occupied person is neither happy nor unhappy, but simply alive and active, which is pleasanter than any happiness until you are tired of it."

"You are so careful of your boy's morals, knowing how troublesome they may be, that you keep him away from the Venus of Milo only to find him in the arms of the scullery maid or someone much worse. You decide that the Hermes of Praxiteles and Wagner's Tristan are not suited for young girls; and your daughter marries somebody appallingly unlike either Hermes or Tristan solely to escape from your parental protection. You have not stifled a single passion nor averted a single danger: you have depraved the passions by starving them, and broken down all the defences which so effectively protect children brought up in freedom."

"A nation should always be healthily rebellious; but the king or prime minister has yet to be found who will make trouble by cultivating that side of the national spirit. A child should begin to assert itself early, and shift for itself more and more not only in washing and dressing itself, but in opinions and conduct; yet as nothing is so exasperating and so unlovable as an uppish child, it is useless to expect parents and schoolmasters to inculcate this uppishness. Such unamiable precepts as Always contradict an authoritative statement, Always return a blow, Never lose a chance of a good fight, When you are scolded for a mistake ask the person who scolds you whether he or she supposes you did it on purpose, and follow the question with a blow or an insult or some other unmistakable expression of resentment, Remember that the progress of the world depends on your knowing better than your elders, are just as important as those of The Sermon on the Mount; but no one has yet seen them written up in letters of gold in a schoolroom or nursery."

"Death is for many of us the gate of hell; but we are inside on the way out, not outside on the way in."

"When will we realize that the fact that we can become accustomed to anything, however disgusting at first, makes it necessary to examine carefully everything we have become accustomed to."

"If parents would only realize how they bore their children!"

"I like a bit of a mongrel myself, whether it's a man or a dog; they're the best for every day."

"A perpetual holiday is a good working definition of Hell."

"Optimistic lies have such immense therapeutic value that a doctor who cannot tell them convincingly has mistaken his profession."

"It is more dangerous to be a great prophet or poet than to promote twenty companies for swindling simple folk out of their savings."

"You'll never have a quiet world till you knock the patriotism out of the human race."

"All great truths begin as blasphemies."

"Custom will reconcile people to any atrocity; and fashion will drive them to acquire any custom."

"Well, I tell you again to get rid of your Constitution. But I suppose you won't do it. You have a good president and you have a bad Constitution, and the bad Constitution gets the better of the good President all the time. The end of it will be is that you might as well have an English Prime Minister."

"Any public committee man who tries to pack the moral cards in the interest of his own notions is guilty of corruption and impertinence. The business of a public library is not to supply the public with the books the committee thinks good for the public, but to supply the public with the books the public wants. ... Censorship ends in logical completeness when nobody is allowed to read any books except the books that nobody can read. But as the ratepayer is mostly a coward and a fool in these difficult matters, and the committee is quite sure that it can succeed where the Roman Catholic Church has made its index expurgatorius the laughing-stock of the world, censorship will rage until it reduces itself to absurdity; and even then the best books will be in danger still."

"As long as I have a want, I have a reason for living. Satisfaction is death."

"That proves it's not by Shaw, because all Shaw's characters are himself: mere puppets stuck up to spout Shaw."

"The word morality, if we met it in the Bible, would surprise us as much as the word telephone or motor car."

"A critic recently described me, with deadly acuteness, as having 'a kindly dislike of my fellow-creatures.' Perhaps dread would have been nearer the mark than dislike; for man is the only animal of which I am thoroughly and cravenly afraid."

"A part of eugenic politics would finally land us in an extensive use of the lethal chamber. A great many people would have to be put out of existence simply because it wastes other people's time to look after them.""

"Why was I born with such contemporaries?"

"Religion is a great force — the only real motive force in the world; but what you fellows don't understand is that you must get at a man through his own religion and not through yours. Instead of facing that fact, you persist in trying to convert all men to your own little sect, so that you can use it against them afterwards. You are all missionaries and proselytizers trying to uproot the native religion from your neighbor's flowerbeds and plant your own in its place. You would rather let a child perish in ignorance than have it taught by a rival sectary. You can talk to me of the quintessential equality of coal merchants and British officers; and yet you can't see the quintessential equality of all the religions."

"I happen, like Napoleon, to prefer Mohammedanism. [Mrs George, associating Mohammedanism with polygamy, looks at him with quick suspicion]. I believe the whole British Empire will adopt a reformed Mohammedanism before the end of the century. The character of Mahomet is congenial to me. I admire him, and share his views of life to a considerable extent."

"You don't learn to hold your own in the world by standing on guard, but by attacking, and getting well hammered yourself."

"The whole strength of England lies in the fact that the enormous majority of the English people are snobs."

"All progress means war with Society."

"Nothing is more dreadful than a husband who keeps telling you everything he thinks, and always wants to know what you think."

"The secret of forgiving everything is to understand nothing."

"Monogamy has a sentimental basis which is quite distinct from the political one of equal numbers of the sexes. Equal numbers in the sexes are quite compatible with a change of partners every day or every hour. Physically there is nothing to distinguish human society from the farm-yard except that children are more troublesome and costly than chickens and calves, and that men and women are not so completely enslaved as farm stock. Accordingly, the people whose conception of marriage is a farm-yard or slave-quarter conception are always more or less in a panic lest the slightest relaxation of the marriage laws should utterly demoralize society; whilst those to whom marriage is a matter of more highly evolved sentiments and needs (sometimes said to be distinctively human, though birds and animals in a state of freedom evince them quite as touchingly as we) are much more liberal, knowing as they do that monogamy will take care of itself provided the parties are free enough, and that promiscuity is a product of slavery and not of liberty."

"Journalists are too poorly paid in this country to know anything that is fit for publication."

"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."

"Love is an appetite which, like all other appetites, is destroyed for the moment by its gratification."