"It's so hard to know what to do when one wishes earnestly to do right."

"The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want and if they can't find them make them."

"Do not do unto others as you expect they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same."

"Censorship ends in logical completeness when nobody is allowed to read any books except the books that nobody reads."

"Morality is not respectability."

"Fights you on patriotic principles he robs you on business principles he enslaves you on imperial principles."

"The liar's punishment is not in the least that he is not believed but that he cannot believe anyone else."

"It is easy-terribly easy-to shake a man's faith in himself. To take advantage of that to to break a man's spirit is Devil's work."

"Beware of the man whose God is in the skies."

"Democracy is a device that insures we shall be governed no better than we deserve."

"The natural term of the affection of the human animal for its offspring is six years."

"Silence is the most perfect expression of scorn."

"When a man wants to murder a tiger he calls it sport, when a tiger wants to murder him he calls it ferocity."

"Martyrdom is the only way a man can become famous without ability."

"The thought of two thousand people crunching celery at the same time horrified me."

"What Englishman will give his mind to politics as long as he can afford to keep a motor car?"

"The longer I live the more I see that I am never wrong about anything, and that all the pains I have so humbly taken to verify my notions have only wasted my time."

"We are made wise not by the recollection of our past, but by the responsibility for our future."

"He knows nothing, and he thinks he knows everything. That points clearly to a political career."

"The love of economy is the root of all virtue."

"The problem with communication is the illusion that is has been accomplished."

"We are the only real aristocracy in the world: the aristocracy of money."

"I finished my first book seventy-six years ago. I offered it to every publisher on the English-speaking earth I had ever heard of. Their refusals were unanimous: and it did not get into print until, fifty years later; publishers would publish anything that had my name on it."

"What you are to do without me I cannot imagine."

"The most distinguished persons become more revolutionary as they grow older."

"We should all be obliged to appear before a board every five years and justify our existence... on pain of liquidation."

"Give a man health and a course to steer and he'll never stop to trouble about whether he's happy or not."

"The minority is sometimes right; the majority always wrong."

"Reading made Don Quixote a gentleman. Believing what he read made him mad."

"Love is a gross exaggeration of the difference between one person and everybody else."

"Democracy is a form of government that substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few."

"Perhaps the greatest social service that can be rendered by anybody to the country and to mankind is to bring up a family."

"The only man I know who behaves sensibly is my tailor, he takes my measurements anew each time he sees me. The rest go on with their old measurements and expect me to fit them."

"I enjoy convalescence. It is the part that makes the illness worthwhile."

"Marriage is an alliance entered into by a man who can't sleep with the window shut, and a woman who can't sleep with the window open."

"Very few people can afford to be poor."

"Only on paper has humanity yet achieved glory, beauty, truth, knowledge, virtue, and abiding love."

"Men are wise in proportion not to their experience but to their capacity for experience."

"A woman who utters such depressing and disgusting sounds has no right to be anywhere - no right to live. Remember that you are a human being with a soul and the divine gift to articulate speech: that your native language is the language of Shakespeare and Milton..."

"I want to be thoroughly used up when I die for the harder I work the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake."

"The great advantage of a hotel is that it's a refuge from home life."

"Everything happens to everybody sooner or later if there is time enough."

"If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas."

"Dancing is a perpendicular expression of a horizontal desire."

"Home life is no more natural to us than a cage is natural to a cockatoo."

"The worst sin toward our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them: that's the essence of inhumanity."

"The possibilities are numerous once we decide to act and not react."

"At present there is not a single credible established religion in the world."

"You don't stop laughing when you grow old, you grow old when you stop laughing."

"HIGGINS. Have you no morals, man?DOOLITTLE [unabashed] Cant afford them, Governor. Neither could you if you was as poor as me."