Quotes
Quotes to inspire and reflect
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.
18
In moments of progress the noble succeed, because things are going their way: in moments of decadence the base succeed for the same reason: hence the world is never without the exhilaration of contemporary success.
16
Decadence can find agents only when it wears the mask of progress.
12
Mens sana in corpore sano is a foolish saying. The sound body is a product of the sound mind.
16
The conversion of a savage to Christianity is the conversion of Christianity to savagery.
20
No man dares say so much of what he thinks as to appear to himself an extremist.
10
Do not waste your time on Social Questions. What is the matter with the poor is Poverty: what is the matter with the rich is Uselessness.
16
Gambling promises the poor what Property performs for the rich: that is why the bishops dare not denounce it fundamentally.
15
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.
15
The most popular method of distributing wealth is the method of the roulette table.
14
Those who understand the steam engine and the electric telegraph spend their lives in trying to replace them with something better.
17
The imagination cannot conceive a viler criminal than he who should build another London like the present one, nor a greater benefactor than he who should destroy it.
15
Civilization is a disease produced by the practice of building societies with rotten material.
18
Those who admire modern civilization usually identify it with the steam engine and the electric telegraph.
18
Home is the girl's prison and the woman's workhouse.
17
Mutiny Acts are needed only by officers who command without authority. Divine right needs no whip.
17
Life levels all men: death reveals the eminent.
18
Every genuinely benevolent person loathes almsgiving and mendicity.
13
Those who minister to poverty and disease are accomplices in the two worst of all the crimes.
13
He who gives money he has not earned is generous with other people's labor.
15
Charity is the most mischievous sort of pruriency.
14
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 Shakespear.
19
In my childhood I demurred to the description of a certain young lady as "the pretty Miss So and So." My aunt rebuked me by saying "Remember always that the least plain sister is the family beauty."
13
The right to live is abused whenever it is not constantly challenged.
12
The Master of Arts, by proving that no man has any natural rights, compels himself to take his own for granted.
15
All men mean well.
8
The thieves had their revenge when Marx convicted the bourgeoisie of theft.
12
Hell is paved with good intentions, not with bad ones.
10
If we could learn from mere experience, the stones of London would be wiser than its wisest men.
19
Those whom we called brutes had their revenge when Darwin shewed us that they are our cousins.
14
Decency is Indecency's Conspiracy of Silence.
12
The man who listens to Reason is lost: Reason enslaves all whose minds are not strong enough to master her.
14
Except during the nine months before he draws his first breath, no man manages his affairs as well as a tree does.
14
The unconscious self is the real genius. Your breathing goes wrong the moment your conscious self meddles with it.
17
A moderately honest man with a moderately faithful wife, moderate drinkers both, in a moderately healthy house: that is the true middle class unit.
14
Moderation is never applauded for its own sake.
13
The North American Indian was a type of the sportsman warrior gentleman. The Periclean Athenian was a type of the intellectually and artistically cultivated gentleman. Both were political failures. The modern gentleman, without the hardihood of the one or the culture of the other, has the appetite of both put together. He will not succeed where they failed.
18
He who believes in education, criminal law, and sport, needs only property to make him a perfect modern gentleman.
14
No elaboration of physical or moral accomplishment can atone for the sin of parasitism.
12
A modern gentleman is necessarily the enemy of his country. Even in war he does not fight to defend it, but to prevent his power of preying on it from passing to a foreigner. Such combatants are patriots in the same sense as two dogs fighting for a bone are lovers of animals.
16
A gentleman of our days is one who has money enough to do what every fool would do if he could afford it: that is, consume without producing.
16
The true diagnostic of modern gentility is parasitism.
12
The fatal reservation of the gentleman is that he sacrifices everything to his honor except his gentility.
10
In his efforts to escape from ugliness and unhappiness the rich man intensifies both. Every new yard of West End creates a new acre of East End.
15
In an ugly and unhappy world the richest man can purchase nothing but ugliness and unhappiness.
13
The tyranny that forbids you to make the road with pick and shovel is worse than that which prevents you from lolling along it in a carriage and pair.
13
The man with toothache thinks everyone happy whose teeth are sound. The poverty stricken man makes the same mistake about the rich man.
19
The more a man possesses over and above what he uses, the more careworn he becomes.
15