Ethics and Morality

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

Compassion is the fellow-feeling of the unsound.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

Decency is Indecency's Conspiracy of Silence.

Moderation is never applauded for its own sake.

A moderately honest man with a moderately faithful wife, moderate drinkers both, in a moderately healthy house: that is the true middle class unit.

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.

He who believes in education, criminal law, and sport, needs only property to make him a perfect modern gentleman.