I am the sort of man who devotes his life to the salvation of humanity in the abstract, and can’t bear to give a penny to a starving widow.

[ Referring to World War I :] When all the world goes mad, one must accept madness as sanity, since sanity is, in the last analysis, nothing but the madness on which the whole world happens to agree.

We all profess the deepest regard for liberty; but no sooner does anyone claim to exercise it than we declare with horror that we are in favor of liberty but not of licence, and demand indignantly whether true freedom can ever mean freedom to do wrong, to preach sedition and immorality, to utter blasphemy. Yet this is exactly what liberty does mean.

I’ve got a soul: don’t tell me I haven’t. Cut me up and you can’t find it. Cut up a steam engine and you can’t find the steam. But, by George, it makes the engine go.

Anybody on for a game of tennis?

I have not wasted my life trifling with literary fools in taverns as [Samuel] Johnson did when he should have been shaking England with the thunder of his spirit.

If you demand my authorities for this and that, I must reply that only those who have never hunted up the authorities as I have believe that there is any authority who is not contradicted flatly by some other authority.

The early Christian rules of life were not made to last, because the early Christians did not believe that the world itself was going to last.

It’s usually pointed out that women are not fit for political power, and ought not to be trusted with a vote because they are politically ignorant, socially prejudiced, narrow-minded, and selfish. True enough, but precisely the same is true of men!

Man and Superman.