“You see things, and you say why? But I dream things that never were; and I say why not?”
“It is easy, terribly easy, to shake a man’s faith in himself. To take advantage of that to break a man’s spirit is devils work.”
“You must not suppose, because I am a man of letters, that I never tried to earn an honest living.”
“The faults of the burglar are the qualities of the financier.”
“The more I see of the moneyed classes, the more I understand the guillotine.”
“A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.”
“He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches.”
“When a stupid man is doing something he is ashamed of, he always declares that it is his duty.”
“Do not do unto others as you would that they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same.”
“I’m afraid we must make the world honest before we can honestly say to our children that honesty is the best policy.”
“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.”
“In heaven an angel is nobody in particular.”
“Assassination is the extreme form of censorship.”
“The surest way to ruin a man who doesn’t know how to handle money is to give him some.”
“I enjoy convalescence. It is the part that makes illness worthwhile.”
“An Irishman’s heart is nothing but his imagination.”
“The most anxious man in prison is the governor.”
"He knows nothing and he thinks he knows everything. That points clearly to a political career."
"Every man over forty is a scoundrel"
"I'm only a beer teetotaler, not a champagne teetotaler."
"Nothing is worth doing unless the consequences may be serious."
"The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one. The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality."
"As long as I have a want, I have a reason for living. Satisfaction is death."
"Every doctor will allow a colleague to decimate a whole countryside sooner than violate the bond of professional etiquette by giving him away."
"If all economists were laid end to end, they would not reach a conclusion."
"A life spent in making mistakes is not only more honorable but more useful than a life spent doing nothing."
"The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them; that's the essence of inhumanity."
"In literature the ambition of the novice is to acquire the literary language: the struggle of the adept is to get rid of it."
"There is no subject on which more dangerous nonsense is talked and thought than marriage."
"I have to live for others and not for myself: that's middle-class morality."
"Newspapers are unable, seemingly, to discriminate between a bicycle accident and the collapse of civilization."
"Old men are dangerous: it doesn't matter to them what is going to happen to the world."
"The test of a man or woman's breeding is how they behave in a quarrel."
