Quotes
Quotes to inspire and reflect
The minimum of national celibacy (ascertained by dividing the number of males in the community by the number of females, and taking the quotient as the number of wives or husbands permitted to each person) is secured in England (where the quotient is 1) by the institution of monogamy.
15
Polygamy, when tried under modern democratic conditions, as by the Mormons, is wrecked by the revolt of the mass of inferior men who are condemned to celibacy by it; for the maternal instinct leads a woman to prefer a tenth share in a first rate man to the exclusive possession of a third rate one. Polyandry has not been tried under these conditions.
11
The most revolutionary invention of the XIX century was the artificial sterilization of marriage.
10
Any marriage system which condemns a majority of the population to celibacy will be violently wrecked on the pretext that it outrages morality.
11
The accidental function of marriage is the gratification of the amoristic sentiment of mankind.
12
The artificial sterilization of marriage makes it possible for marriage to fulfill its accidental function whilst neglecting its essential one.
15
The essential function of marriage is the continuance of the race, as stated in the Book of Common Prayer.
10
Marriage is the only legal contract which abrogates as between the parties all the laws that safeguard the particular relation to which it refers.
13
Do not give your children moral and religious instruction unless you are quite sure they will not take it too seriously. Better be the mother of Henri Quatre and Nell Gwynne than of Robespierre and Queen Mary Tudor.
15
No man can be a pure specialist without being in the strict sense an idiot.
14
Every fool believes what his teachers tell him, and calls his credulity science or morality as confidently as his father called it divine revelation.
11
No man fully capable of his own language ever masters another.
14
Activity is the only road to knowledge.
12
A learned man is an idler who kills time with study. Beware of his false knowledge: it is more dangerous than ignorance.
13
The vilest abortionist is he who attempts to mould a child's character.
16
At the University every great treatise is postponed until its author attains impartial judgment and perfect knowledge. If a horse could wait as long for its shoes and would pay for them in advance, our blacksmiths would all be college dons.
11
The best brought-up children are those who have seen their parents as they are. Hypocrisy is not the parent's first duty.
15
A fool's brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence University education.
15
The relation of superior to inferior excludes good manners.
13
When a man teaches something he does not know to somebody else who has no aptitude for it, and gives him a certificate of proficiency, the latter has completed the education of a gentleman.
15
Where equality is undisputed, so also is subordination.
12
Equality is fundamental in every department of social organization.
11
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.
12
The notion that the colonel need be a better man than the private is as confused as the notion that the keystone need be stronger than the coping stone.
12
He who confuses political liberty with freedom and political equality with similarity has never thought for five minutes about either.
14
Nothing can be unconditional: consequently nothing can be free.
15
A colonial Imperialist is one who raises colonial troops, equips a colonial squadron, claims a Federal Parliament sending its measures to the Throne instead of to the Colonial Office, and, being finally brought by this means into insoluble conflict with the insular British Imperialist, "cuts the painter" and breaks up the Empire.
17
Excess of local self-assertion makes a colonist an Imperialist.
13
Government presents only one problem: the discovery of a trustworthy anthropometric method.
13
Excess of insularity makes a Briton an Imperialist.
14
Democratic republics can no more dispense with national idols than monarchies with public functionaries.
13
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.
16
Vulgarity in a king flatters the majority of the nation.
11
The flunkeyism propagated by the throne is the price we pay for its political convenience.
13
Kings are not born: they are made by artificial hallucination. When the process is interrupted by adversity at a critical age, as in the case of Charles II, the subject becomes sane and never completely recovers his kingliness.
15
The Court is the servant's hall of the sovereign.
11
When the wooden idol does not answer the peasant's prayer, he beats it: when the flesh and blood idol does not satisfy the civilized man, he cuts its head off.
11
He who slays a king and he who dies for him are alike idolaters.
13
The populace cannot understand the bureaucracy: it can only worship the national idols.
13
A limited monarchy is a device for combining the inertia of a wooden idol with the credibility of a flesh and blood one.
11
The bureaucracy consists of functionaries; the aristocracy, of idols; the democracy, of idolaters.
14
Do not love your neighbor as yourself. If you are on good terms with yourself it is an impertinence: if on bad, an injury.
13
IF BOOKS ARE NOT GOOD COMPANY, WHERE WILL I FIND IT?
16
Do not do unto others as you would that they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same.
16
A writer only begins a book. A reader finishes it.
11
Having to read a footnote resembles having to go downstairs to answer the door while in the midst of making love.
19
Fiction is like a spider’s web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners.
22
I would sooner read a timetable or a catalogue than nothing at all.
13