Ethics and Morality

When a heretic wishes to avoid martyrdom he speaks of "Orthodoxy, True and False" and demonstrates that the True is his heresy.

Political Economy and Social Economy are amusing intellectual games; but Vital Economy is the Philosopher Stone.

The Chinese tame fowls by clipping their wings, and women by deforming their feet. A petticoat round the ankles serves equally well.

Acquired notions of propriety are stronger than natural instincts. It is easier to recruit for monasteries and convents than to induce an Arab woman to uncover her mouth in public, or a British officer to walk through Bond Street in a golfing cap on an afternoon in May.

Those who understand evil pardon it: those who resent it destroy it.

Compassion is the fellow-feeling of the unsound.

If the wicked flourish and the fittest survive, Nature must be the God of rascals.

If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience!

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.

Do not mistake your objection to defeat for an objection to fighting, your objection to being a slave for an objection to slavery, your objection to not being as rich as your neighbor for an objection to poverty. The cowardly, the insubordinate, and the envious share your objections.

Decadence can find agents only when it wears the mask of progress.

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.

No man dares say so much of what he thinks as to appear to himself an extremist.

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.

The conversion of a savage to Christianity is the conversion of Christianity to savagery.

Gambling promises the poor what Property performs for the rich: that is why the bishops dare not denounce it fundamentally.

The most popular method of distributing wealth is the method of the roulette table.

Every genuinely benevolent person loathes almsgiving and mendicity.

He who gives money he has not earned is generous with other people's labor.

Those who minister to poverty and disease are accomplices in the two worst of all the crimes.

The Master of Arts, by proving that no man has any natural rights, compels himself to take his own for granted.

The right to live is abused whenever it is not constantly challenged.

Hell is paved with good intentions, not with bad ones.

Those whom we called brutes had their revenge when Darwin shewed us that they are our cousins.