Society and the World

When asked what was first in oratory, [he] replied to his questioner, ‘action,’ what second, ‘action,’ and again third, ‘action’.

By convention there is colour, by convention sweetness, by convention bitterness, but in reality there are atoms and space.

What is the world, O soldiers?

Since a politician never believes what he says, he is quite surprised to be taken at his word.

Treaties, you see, are like girls and roses: they last while they last.

Politics are too serious a matter to be left to the politicians.

How can you govern a country which has 246 varieties of cheese?

France has lost a battle. But France has not lost the war!

Titles are shadows, crowns are empty things,

Your Roman-Saxon-Danish-Norman English.

From this amphibious ill-born mob began

Nature has left this tincture in the blood,

Nature has left this tincture in the blood,

One is not born a woman: one becomes one.

[Natural selection] has no vision, no foresight, no sight at all. If it can be said to play the role of watchmaker in nature, it is the blind watchmaker.

I see Canada as a country torn between a very northern, rather extraordinary, mystical spirit which it fears and its desire to present itself to the world as a Scotch banker.

I see Canada as a country torn between a very northern, rather extraordinary, mystical spirit which it fears and its desire to present itself to the world as a Scotch banker.

Animals, whom we have made our slaves, we do not like to consider our equal.

The expression often used by Mr Herbert Spencer of the Survival of the Fittest is more accurate [than ‘Struggle for Existence’], and is sometimes equally convenient.

I have called this principle, by which each slight variation, if useful, is preserved, by the term of Natural Selection.

The highest possible stage in moral culture is when we recognize that we ought to control our thoughts.

In science, we must be interested in things, not in persons.

listen: there’s a hell

a politician is an arse upon