All Quotes

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

"No man can be a pure specialist without being in the strict sense an idiot."

"The man who has graduated from the flogging block at Eton to the bench from which he sentences the garrotter to be flogged is the same social product as the garrotter who has been kicked by his father and cuffed by his mother until he has grown strong enough to throttle and rob the rich citizen whose money he desires."

"Criminals do not die by the hands of the law. They die by the hands of other men."

"When a man wants to murder a tiger he calls it sport: when the tiger wants to murder him he calls it ferocity. The distinction between Crime and Justice is no greater."

"It is not necessary to replace a guillotined criminal: it is necessary to replace a guillotined social system."

"There are no perfectly honorable men; but every true man has one main point of honor and a few minor ones."

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

"Self-denial is not a virtue: it is only the effect of prudence on rascality."

"Obedience simulates subordination as fear of the police simulates honesty."

"Disobedience, the rarest and most courageous of the virtues, is seldom distinguished from neglect, the laziest and commonest of the vices."

"In a stupid nation the man of genius becomes a god: everybody worships him and nobody does his will."

"Happiness and Beauty are by-products."

"Riches and Art are spurious receipts for the production of Happiness and Beauty."

"He who desires a lifetime of happiness with a beautiful woman desires to enjoy the taste of wine by keeping his mouth always full of it."

"The man with a toothache thinks everyone happy whose teeth are sound. The poverty stricken man makes the same mistake about the rich man."

"The more a man possesses over and above what he uses, the more careworn he becomes."

"In an ugly and unhappy world the richest man can purchase nothing but ugliness and unhappiness."

"No elaboration of physical or moral accomplishment can atone for the sin of parasitism."

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."

"Reason enslaves all whose minds are not strong enough to master her."

"Decency is Indecency's Conspiracy of Silence."

"Men are wise in proportion, not to their experience, but to their capacity for experience. If we could learn from mere experience, the stones of London would be wiser than its wisest men."

"No age or condition is without its heroes. The least incapable general in a nation is its Cæsar, the least imbecile statesman its Solon, the least confused thinker its Socrates, the least commonplace poet its Shakespeare."

"The roulette table pays nobody except him that keeps it. Nevertheless a passion for gaming is common, though a passion for keeping roulette tables is unknown."

"The reformer for whom the world is not good enough finds himself shoulder to shoulder with him that is not good enough for the world."

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

"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."

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

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

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

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

"Remember: it is not given to man to take his goods with him."

"There is no one who can return from there, To describe their nature, to describe their dissolution, That he may still our desires, Until we reach the place where they have gone."

"Blow, northerne wynd, Sent thou me my suetyng! Blow, northerne wynd, Blou! Blou! Blou!"

"Bothe lered and lewed, olde and yonge, Alle understonden English tonge."

"Evyl weed ys sone y growe."

"For I muste to the grene wode goo, alone a bannysshed man."

"For in my mynde, of all mankynde I loue but you allon."

"Foweles in the frith, The fisses in the flod, And I mon waxe wod; Mulch sorwe I walke with For best of bon and blod."

"(They are) no more like, Than chalk is to cheese."

"Ich am of Irlaunde, Ant of the holy londe Of Irlande. Gode sire, pray ich the, For of saynte charité, Come ant daunce wyth me In Irlaunde."

"I wold not be in a folis paradyce."

"Lever me were to lete mi liif, Than thus to lese the quen mi wiif!"

"O little booke, thou art so unconning, How darst thou put thy-self in prees for drede?"