It took me twenty years of studied self-restraint, aided by the natural decay of my faculties, to make myself dull enough to be accepted as a serious person by the British public.

The world is populated in the main by people who should not exist.

We learn from experience that men never learn anything from experience.

Virtue is insufficient temptation.

Few people think more than two or three times a year; I have made an international reputation for myself by thinking once or twice a week.

Doolittle: Can’t afford them, Governor.

The secret to success is to offend the greatest number of people.

Tanner: I am a gentleman: I live by robbing the poor.

The more I see of the moneyed classes, the more I understand the guillotine.

Marriage is an alliance entered into by a man who can’t sleep with the window shut, and a woman who can’t sleep with the window open.