"Youth is such a wonderful thing. What a crime to waste it on children."

"Youth, which is forgiven everything, forgives itself nothing: age, which forgives itself everything, is forgiven nothing."

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

"Self-sacrifice enables us to sacrifice other people without blushing."

"Few people think more than two or three times a year. I have made an international reputation for myself by thinking once or twice a week."

"You will never have a quiet world until you knock the patriotism out of the human race."

"The greatest evils and the worst of crimes is poverty; our first duty, a duty to which every other consideration should be sacrificed, is not to be poor."

"The seven deadly sins... food, clothing, firing, rent, taxes, respectability and children. Nothing can lift those seven millstones from Man's neck but money; and the spirit cannot soar until the millstones are lifted."

"You cannot have power for good without having power for evil too. Even mother's milk nourishes murderers as well as heroes."

"Common people do not pray; they only beg."

"All progress is initiated by challenging current conceptions, and executed by supplanting existing institutions."

"All problems are finally scientific problems."

"Words are only postage stamps delivering the object for you to unwrap"

"The only way for a woman to provide for herself decently is for her to be good to some man that can afford to be good to her."

"You must not suppose, because I am a man of letters, that I never tried to earn an honest living."

"The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and about all time."

"I don't want to talk grammar. I want to talk like a lady."

"There are no secrets better kept than the secrets that everybody guesses"

"Decency is indecency's conspiracy of silence"

"A nap, my friend, is a brief period of sleep which overtakes superannuated persons when they endeavor to entertain unwelcome visitors or to listen to scientific lectures."

"It is a noteworthy fact that kicking and beating have played so considerable a part in the habits which necessity has imposed on mankind in past ages that the only way of preventing civilized men from beating and kicking their wives is to organize games in which they can kick and beat balls."

"What is both surprising and delightful is that spectators are allowed, and even expected, to join in the vocal part of the game.... There is no reason why the field should not try to put the batsman off his stroke at the critical moment by neatly timed disparagements of his wife's fidelity and his mother's respectability."

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."

"Of the two lots, the woman's lot of perpetual motherhood, and the man's of perpetual babyhood, I prefer the man's"

"The man who listens to Reason is lost: Reason enslaves all whose minds are not strong enough to master her"

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

"Marriage is popular because it combines the maximum of temptation with the maximum of opportunity."

"It is difficult, if not impossible, for most people to think otherwise than in the fashion of their own period."

"Few people think more than two or three times a year. I have made an international reputation for myself thinking once or twice a week."

"I was a freethinker before I knew how to think."

"A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul."

"We want a few mad people now. See where the sane ones have landed us!"

"This is the true joy in life - being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one."

"The joy in life is to be used for a purpose. I want to be used up when I die."

"Leisure may be defined as free activity, labor as compulsory activity. Leisure does what it likes, labor does what it must, the compulsion being that of Nature, which in these latitudes leaves men no choice between labor and starvation."

"What is the matter with the poor is poverty; what is the matter with the rich is uselessness."

"The golden rule is that there are no golden rules."

"In literature the ambition of the novice is to acquire the literary language: the struggle of the adept is to get rid of it."

"Reminiscences make one feel so deliciously aged and sad."

"If women were as fastidious as men, morally or physically, there would be an end of the race."

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

"There is no subject on which more dangerous nonsense is talked and thought than marriage."

"What is virtue but the Trade Unionism of the married?"

"The English have no respect for their language, and will not teach their children to speak it."

"Whenever you wish to do anything against the law, Cicely, always consult a good solicitor first."

"An Englishman thinks he is moral when he is only uncomfortable."

"The more things a man is ashamed of, the more respectable he is."

"Morality is suspecting other people of not being legally married."

"The nations morals are like its teeth, the more decayed they are the more it hurts to touch them."

"Science becomes dangerous only when it imagines that it has reached its goal."