"That is what all poets do: they talk to themselves out loud, and the world overhears them."

"My schooling not only failed to teach me what it professed to be teaching, but prevented me from being educated to an extent which infuriates me when I think of all I might have learned at home by myself."

"If you must hold yourself up to your children as an object lesson, hold yourself up as a warning and not as an example."

"What we want is to see the child in pursuit of knowledge, and not knowledge in pursuit of the child."

"When a man says money can do anything, that settles it: he hasn't got any."

"Human beings are the only animals of which I am thoroughly and cravenly afraid."

"The Nazi movement is in many respects one which has my warmest sympathy."

"Without art the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable."

"You see things; and you say "Why?" But I dream things that never were; and I say "Why not?""

"If you take too long in deciding what to do with your life, you'll find you've done it."

"Beauty is all very well at first sight but who ever looks at it when it has been in the house three days?"

"Chess is a foolish expedient for making idle people believe they are doing something very clever, when they are only wasting their time."

"But I cant stand saying one thing when everyone knows I mean another. Whats the use in such hypocrisy? If people arrange the world that way for women, theres no good pretending it's arranged the other way..."

"Hatred is the coward's revenge for being intimidated."

"I have to live for others and not for myself: that's middle-class morality."

"A little learning is a dangerous thing, but we must take that risk because a little is as much as our biggest heads can hold."

"Choose silence of all virtues, for by it you hear other men's imperfections, and conceal your own."

"When our relatives are at home, we have to think of all their good points or it would be impossible to endure them. But when they are away, we console ourselves for their absence by dwelling on their vices."

"The American white relegates the black to the rank of shoeshine boy, and he concludes from this that the black is good for nothing but shining shoes."

"The best place to find God is in a garden. You can dig for him there."

"I am a Christian. That obliges me to be a Communist."

"Do not try to live forever. You will not succeed."

"Reading made Don Quixote a gentleman, but believing what he read made him mad."

"If we women were particular about men's characters, we should never get married at all."

"Life isn't about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself."

"I shall always be a flower girl to Professor Higgins, because he always treats me as a flower girl, and always will; but I know I can be a lady to you, because you always treat me as a lady, and always will."

"No man who is occupied in doing a very difficult thing, and doing it very well, ever loses his self-respect."

"Modern poverty is not the poverty that was blest in the Sermon on the Mount."

"There is no satisfaction in hanging a man who does not object to it."

"There is only one religion, though there are a hundred versions of it."

"Old men are dangerous: it doesn't matter to them what is going to happen to the world."

"Democracy substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few."

"Clever and attractive women do not want to vote; they are willing to let men govern as long as they govern men."

"A tragic situation exists precisely when virtue does NOT triumph but when it is still felt that man is nobler than the forces which destroy him."

"I am sorry to have to introduce the subject of Christmas into these articles. It is an indecent subject; a cruel, gluttonous subject; a drunken, disorderly subject; a wasteful, disastrous, subject; a wicked, cadging, lying, filthy, blashphemous, and demoralizing subject. Christmas is forced on a reluctant and disgusted nation by the shopkeepers and the press: on its own merits it would wither and shrivel in the fiery breath of universal hatred; and any one who looked back to it would be turned into a pillar of greasy sausages."

"Life levels all men. Death reveals the eminent."

"All censorships exist to prevent anyone from challenging current conceptions and existing institutions. All progress is initiated by challenging current conceptions, and executed by supplanting existing institutions. Consequently, the first condition of progress is the removal of censorship."

"I am only a beer teetotaller not a champagne teetotaller."

"As long as I have a want I have a reason for living. Satisfaction is death."

"Syllables govern the world."

"Patriotism is, fundamentally, a conviction that a particular country is the best in the world because you were born in it...."

"It is a woman's business to get married as soon as possible, and a man'sto keep unmarried as long as he can."

"Nothing but the natural ignorance of the public, countenanced by the inoculated erroneousness of the ordinary general medical practitioners, makes such a barbarism as vaccination possible.......Recent developments have shown that an inoculation made in the usual general practitioner's light-hearted way, without previous highly skilled examination of the state of the patient's blood, is just as likely to be a simple manslaughter as a cure or preventive. But vaccination is nothing short of attempted murder. A skilled bacteriologist would just as soon think of cutting his child's arm and rubbing the contents of the dustpan into the wound, as vaccinating it in the same."

"She had lost the art of conversation but not, unfortunately, the power of speech."

"If you leave the smallest corner of your head vacant for a moment, other people's opinions will rush in from all quarters."

"It is assumed that the woman must wait motionless until she is wooed. That is how the spider waits for the fly."

"There are no perfectly honorable men, but every true man has one main point of honor and a few minor ones."

"You see things; you say, 'Why?' But I dream things that never were; and I say 'Why not?"

"It is most unwise for people in love to marry."

"The heart of an Irishman is nothing but his imagination."