"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."

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

"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."

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

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

"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."

"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."

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

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

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

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

"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."

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

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

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

"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."

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

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

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

"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."

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

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

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

"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."