"Pasteboard pies and paper flowers are being banished from the stage by the growth of that power of accurate observation which is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it..."

"No public man in these islands ever believes that the Bible means what it says: he is always convinced that it says what he means; and I have no reason to hope that Mr Coote may be an exception to the rule."

"My method is to take the utmost trouble to find the right thing to say, and then to say it with the utmost levity."

"Die Walküre is endured by the average man because it contains four scenes for which he would sit out a Scotch sermon, or even a House of Commons debate. These are the love duet in the first act, Brunnhilde's announcement of death in the second, the ride of the Valkyries and the 'fire-charm' in the third. For them the ordinary playgoer endures hours of Wotan, with Christopher Sly's prayer in his heart. 'Would 'twere over!' Now, I am one of those elect souls who are deeply moved by Wotan. I grant you that as a long-winded, one-eyed gentleman backing a certain champion in a fight and henpecked out of his fancy because his wife objects to the moral character of the champion, he is a dreary person indeed . . . but to one who has understood all its beauties, its lofty aspirations, its tragedy, there is nothing trivial, nothing tedious in Die Walküre."

"We have no more right to consume happiness without producing it than to consume wealth without producing it."

"I'm only a beer teetotaler, not a champagne teetotaler. I don't like beer."

"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."

"The great advantage of a hotel is that it's a refuge from home life."

"My specialty is being right when other people are wrong."

"I had not achieved a success; but I provoked an uproar; and the sensation was so agreeable that I resolved to try again."

"There is only one religion, though there are a hundred versions of it."

"Why should you call me to account for eating decently? If I battened on the scorched corpses of animals, you might well ask me why I did that. Why should I be filthy and inhuman? Why should I be an accomplice in the wholesale horror and degradation of the slaughter-house?"

"I have never admitted the right of an elderly author to alter the work of a young author, even when the young author happens to be his former self. In the case of a work which is a mere exhibition of skill in conventional art, there may be some excuse for the delusion that the longer the artist works on it the nearer he will bring it to perfection. Yet even the victims of this delusion must see that there is an age limit to the process, and that though a man of forty-five may improve the workmanship of a man of thirty-five, it does not follow that a man of fifty-five can do the same. When we come to creative art, to the living word of a man delivering a message to his own time, it is clear that any attempt to alter this later on is simply fraud and forgery. As I read the old Quintessence of Ibsenism I may find things that I see now at a different angle, or correlate with so many things then unnoted by me that they take on a different aspect. But though this may be a reason for writing another book, it is not a reason for altering an existing one."

"Just as the liar's punishment is, not in the least that he is not believed, but that he cannot believe any one else; so a guilty society can more easily be persuaded that any apparently innocent act is guilty than that any apparently guilty act is innocent."

"The salvation of the world depends on the men who will not take evil good-humouredly, and whose laughter destroys the fool instead of encouraging him."

"It's well to be off with the Old Woman before you're on with the New."

"The fickleness of the women I love is only equaled by the infernal constancy of the women who love me."

"The test of a man or woman's breeding is how they behave in a quarrel."

"People are always blaming 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."

"There are no secrets better kept than the secrets that everybody guesses."

"I know Miss Warren is a great devotee of the Gospel of Getting On."

"You can always tell an old soldier by the inside of his holsters and cartridge boxes. The young ones carry pistols and cartridges; the old ones, grub."

"Beware of the man whose god is in the skies."

"Oh, you are a very poor soldier — a chocolate cream soldier!"

"I never apologize."

"You're not a man, you're a machine."

"Hail, Sphinx: salutation from Julius Caesar! I have wandered in many lands, seeking the lost regions from which my birth into this world exiled me, and the company of creatures such as I myself. I have found flocks and pastures, men and cities, but no other Caesar, no air native to me, no man kindred to me, none who can do my day's deed, and think my night's thought."

"My way hither was the way of destiny; for I am he of whose genius you are the symbol: part brute, part woman, and part God — nothing of man in me at all. Have I read your riddle, Sphinx?"

"Theodotus: Caesar: you are a stranger here, and not conversant with our laws. The kings and queens of Egypt may not marry except with their own royal blood. Ptolemy and Cleopatra are born king and consort just as they are born brother and sister. Britannus (shocked): Caesar: this is not proper. Theodotus (outraged): How! Caesar (recovering his self-possession): Pardon him, Theodotus: he is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature."

"When a stupid man is doing something he is ashamed of, he always declares that it is his duty."

"Again, there is the illusion of "increased command over Nature," meaning that cotton is cheap and that ten miles of country road on a bicycle have replaced four on foot. But even if man's increased command over Nature included any increased command over himself (the only sort of command relevant to his evolution into a higher being), the fact remains that it is only by running away from the increased command over Nature to country places where Nature is still in primitive command over Man that he can recover from the effects of the smoke, the stench, the foul air, the overcrowding, the racket, the ugliness, the dirt which the cheap cotton costs us."

"The novelties of one generation are only the resuscitated fashions of the generation before last."

"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."

"The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them: that's the essence of inhumanity."

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

": What will History say? : History, sir, will tell lies, as usual."

"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."

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

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

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

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

"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."

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