120 Home is the girl's prison and the woman's workhouse.
121 Most of the money given by rich people in "charity" is made up of conscience money, "ransom," political bribery, and bids for titles.... One buys moral credit by signing a cheque, which is easier than turning a prayer wheel.
122 It is not enough to know what is good: you must be able to do it.
123 Life at its noblest leaves mere happiness far behind; and indeed cannnot endure it.... Happiness is not the object of life: life has no object: it is an end in itself; and courage consists in the readiness to sacrifice happiness for an intenser quality of life.
124 If a man is indolent, let him be poor. If he is drunken, let him be poor.... Also—somewhat inconsistently—blessed are the poor!
125 Unbounded hopes were placed on each successive extension of the electoral franchise, culminating in the enfranchisement of women. These hopes have been disappointed, because the voters, male and female, being politically untrained and uneducated, have (a) no grasp of constructive measures; (b) loathe taxation as such; (c) dislike being governed at all; and (d) dread and resent any extension of official interference as an encroachment on their personal liberty.
126 It is not the number of years we have behind us, but the number we have before us, that makes us careful and responsible and determined to find out the truth about everything.
127 He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches.
128 Self-denial is not a virtue: it is only the effect of prudence on rascality.
129 It is always necessary to overstate a cast startlingly to make people sit up and listen to it, and to frighten them into acting on it.
130 It has no share in the leadership of thought: it does not even reflect its current. It does not create beauty: it apes fashion. It does not produce personal skill: our actors and actresses, with the exception of a few persons with natural gifts and graces, mostly miscultivated or half-cultivated, are simply the middle-class section of the residuum.
131 To me the sole hope of human salvation lies in teaching Man to regard himself as an experiment in the realization of God, to regard his hands as God's hand, his brain as God's brain, his purpose as God's purpose. He must regard God as a helpless Longing, which longed him into existence by its desperate need for an executive organ.
132 It is not true that men can be divided into absolutely honest persons and absolutely dishonest ones. Our honesty varies with the strain put on it.
133 A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.
134 You are all fundamentalists with a top dressing of science. That is why you are the stupidest of conservatives and reactionists in politics and the most bigoted of obstructionists in science itself. When it comes to getting a move on you are all of the same opinion: stop it, flog it, hang it, dynamite it, stamp it out.
135 Such poverty as we have today in all our great cities degrades the poor, and infects with its degradation the whole neighborhood in which they live. And whatever can degrade a neighborhood can degrade a country and a continent and finally the whole civilized world, which is only a large neighborhood.
136 Between persons of equal income there is no social distinction except the distinction of merit. Money is nothing: character, conduct, and capacity are everything.... There would be great people and ordinary people and little people, but the great would always be those who had done great things, and never the idiots whose mothers had spoiled them and whose fathers had left them a hundred thousand a year; and the little would be persons of small minds and mean characters, and not poor persons who had never had a chance. That is why idiots are always in favour of inequality of income (their only chance of eminence), and the really great in favour of equality.
137 The national anthem belongs to the eighteenth century. In it you find us ordering God about to do our political dirty work.
138 The ordinary man is an anarchist. He wants to do as he likes. He may want his neighbour to be governed, but he himself doesn't want to be governed. He is mortally afraid of government officials and policemen.
139 Men conceive themselves as morally superior to those with whom they differ in opinion. A Socialist who thinks that the opinions of Mr. Gladstone on Socialism are unsound and his own sound, is within his rights; but a Socialist who thinks that his opinions are virtuous and Mr. Gladstone's vicious, violates the first rule of morals and manners in a Democratic country; namely, that you must not treat your political opponent as a moral delinquent.
140 Parentage is a very important profession; but no test of fitness for it is ever imposed in the interest of children.
141 Man is the only animal which esteems itself rich in proportion to the number and voracity of its parasites.
142 When a thing is funny, search it for a hidden truth.
143 Unless the people can choose their leaders and rulers, and can revoke their choice at intervals long enough to test their measures by results, the government will be a tyranny exercised in the interests of whatever classes or castes or mobs or cliques have this choice.
144 Youth, which is forgiven everything, forgives itself nothing: age, which forgives itself everything, is forgiven nothing.
145 I am afraid we must make the world honest before we can honestly say to our children that honesty is the best policy.
146 Ladies and gentleman are permitted to have friends in the kennel, but not in the kitchen.
147 A nap, my friend, is a brief period of sleep which overtakes superannuated persons when they endeavour to entertain unwelcome visitors or to listen to scientific lectures.
148 If all economists were laid end to end, they would not reach a conclusion.
149 We are the only real aristocracy in the world: the aristocracy of money.
150 Kings are not born: they are made by artificial hallucination.
151 The man of business ... goes on Sunday to the church with the regularity of the village blacksmith, there to renounce and abjure before his God the line of conduct which he intends to pursue with all his might during the following week.
152 We know now that the soul is the body, and the body the soul. They tell us they are different because they want to persuade us that we can keep our souls if we let them make slaves of our bodies.
153 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.
154 I claim to be a conscientiously immoral writer.
155 The difference between a lady and a flower girl is not how she behaves, but how she's treated.
156 Hawkins: The will is not exactly in proper legal phraseology. Richard: No: my father died without the consolations of the law.
157 Not until he acquires European manners does the American anarchist become the gentleman who assures you that people cannot be made moral by Act of Parliament (the truth being that it is only by Acts of Parliament that men in large communities can be made moral, even when they want to).
158 In Heaven an angel is nobody in particular.
159 Silence is the most perfect expression of scorn.
160 Hell is paved with good intentions, not with bad ones. All men mean well.
161 In the arts of life man invents nothing; but in the arts of death he outdoes Nature herself, and produces by chemistry and machinery all the slaughter of plague, pestilence, and famine.
162 The buried truth germinates and breaks through to the light.
163 Englishmen never will be slaves: they are free to do whatever the Government and public opinion allow them to do.
164 Life levels all men. Death reveals the eminent.
165 There is nothing on earth more exquisite than a bonny book, with well-placed columns of rich black writing in beautiful borders, and illuminated pictures cunningly inset. But nowadays, instead of looking at books, people read them. A book might as well be one of those orders for bacon and bran.
166 An Englishman thinks he is moral when he is only uncomfortable.
167 The most anxious man in a prison is the governor.
168 Englishmen never will be slaves: they are free to do whatever the Government and public opinion allow them to do.
169 You're only a beginner; and what you think is love, and interest, and all that, is not real love at all: three quarters of it is only unsatisfied curiosity.
170 A love affair should always be a honeymoon. And the only way to make sure of that is to keep changing the man; for the same man can never keep it up.
171 Man gives every reason for his conduct save one, every excuse for his crimes save one, every plea for his safety save one; and that one is his cowardice.
172 Marriage is popular because it combines the maximum of temptation with the maximum of opportunity.
173 When I speak of The Case for Equality I mean human equality; and that, of course, can only mean one thing: it means equality of income.
174 What is Virtue but the Trade Unionism of the married?
175 Do you think that the things people make fools of themselves about are any less real and true than the things they behave sensibly about?
176 I sing, not arms and the hero, but the philosophic man: he who seeks in contemplation to discover the inner will of the world, in invention to discover the means of fulfilling that will, and in action to do that will by the so-discovered means.
177 That is what all poets do: they talk to themselves out loud; and the world overhears them. But it's horribly lonely not to hear someone else talk sometimes.
178 The cinema is going to form the mind of England. The national conscience, the national ideals and tests of conduct, will be those of the film.
179 As to spelling the very frequent word though with six letters instead of two, it is impossible to discuss it, as it is outside the range of common sanity. In comparison such a monstrosity as phlegm for flem is merely disgusting.
180 Mendoza: I am a brigand: I live by robbing the rich. Tanner: I am a gentleman: I live by robbing the poor.
181 Of the three official objects of our prison system: vengeance, deterrence, and reformation of the criminal, only one is achieved; and that is the one which is nakedly abominable.
182 The lesson intended by an author is hardly ever the lesson the world chooses to learn from his book.
183 No severity of punishment deters when detection is uncertain, as it always must be.
184 Democracy substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few.
185 You cannot have power for good without having power for evil too. Even mother's milk nourishes murderers as well as heroes.
186 This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap heap; the being a force of Nature instead of a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. And also the only real tragedy in life is being used by personally minded men for purposes which you recognize to be base.
187 What God hath joined together no man ever shall put asunder: God will take care of that.
188 Bible worship, though at its best it may achieve sublimity by keeping its head in the skies, may also make itself both ridiculous and dangerous by having its feet off the ground.
189 I am a sort of collector of religions; and the curious thing is that I find I can believe them all.
190 You cannot have power for good without having power for evil too. Even mother's milk nourishes murderers as well as heroes.
191 Virtue consists, not in abstaining from vice, but in not desiring it.
192 [He] didn't dare to, because his father had a weak heart and habitually threatened to drop dead if anybody hurt his feelings. You may have noticed that people with weak hearts are the tyrants of English married life.
193 I ... must continue to strive for more knowledge and more power, though the new knowledge always contradicts the old and the new power is the destruction of the fools who misuse it.
194 Assassination is the extreme form of censorship.
195 The conversion of a savage to Christianity is the conversion of Christianity to savagery.
196 Unless the law of marriage were first made human, it could never become divine.
197 The great danger of conversion in all ages has been that when the religion of the high mind is offered to the lower mind, the lower mind, feeling its fascination without understanding it, and being incapable of rising to it, drags it down to its level by degrading it.
198 Everybody who does not live in a prostitute's bed and on a diet of cocaine snow is called an ascetic nowadays.
199 We have no more right to consume happiness without producing it than to consume wealth without producing it.
200 Old men are dangerous: it doesn't matter to them what is going to happen to the world.
201 Men are not governed by justice, but by law or persuasion. When they refuse to be governed by law or persuasion, they have to be governed by force or fraud, or both.
202 Soldiering, my dear madam, is the coward's art of attacking mercilessly when you are strong, and keeping out of harm's way when you are weak. That is the whole secret of successful fighting. Get your enemy at a disadvantage; and never, on any account, fight him on equal terms.
203 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.
204 The universal regard for money is the one hopeful fact in our civilisation. Money is the most important thing in the world. It represents health, strength, honour, generosity and beauty.... Not the least of its virtues is that it destroys base people as certainly as it fortifies and dignifies noble people.
205 As long as you don't fly openly in the face of society, society doesn't ask any inconvenient questions; and it makes precious short work of the cads who do. There are no secrets better kept than the secrets everybody guesses.
206 If marriages were made by putting all the men's names into one sack and the women's names into another, and having them taken out by a blindfolded child like lottery numbers, there would be just as high a percentage of happy marriages as we have here in England.... If you can tell me of any trustworthy method of selecting a wife, I shall be happy to make use of it.
207 I'm only a beer teetotaller, not a champagne teetotaller. I don't like beer.
208 In a living society every day is a day of judgment; and its recognition as such is not the end of all things but the beginning of a real civilization.
209 A vegetarian is not a person who lives on vegetables, any more than a Catholic is a person who lives on cats.
210 Life on board a pleasure steamer violates every moral and physical condition of healthy life except fresh air.... It is a guzzling, lounging, gambling, dog's life. The only alternative to excitement is irritability.
211 If you strike a child, take care that you strike it in anger, even at the risk of maiming it for life. A blow in cold blood neither can nor should be forgiven.
212 Your wits can't thicken in that soft moist air, on those white springy roads, in those misty rushes and brown bogs, on those hillsides of granite rocks and magenta heather. You've no such colours in the sky, no such lure in the distances, no such sadness in the evenings. Oh the dreaming! the dreaming! the torturing, heart-scalding, never satisfying dreaming, dreaming, dreaming, dreaming!
213 Joan: I hear voices telling me what to do. They come from God. Robert: They come from your imagination. Joan: Of course. That is how the messages of God come to us.
214 The popular definition of tragedy is heavy drama in which everyone is killed in the last act, comedy being light drama in which everyone is married in the last act.
215 Theodotus: Caesar: once in ten generations of men, the world gains an immortal book. Caesar: If it did not flatter mankind, the common executioner would burn it.
216 Live in contact with dreams and you will get something of their charm: live in contact with facts and you will get something of their brutality. I wish I could find a country to live in where the facts were not brutal and the dreams not real.
217 The degree of tolerance attainable at any moment depends on the strain under which society is maintaining its cohesion.
218 The sex relation is not a personal relation. It can be irresistibly desired and rapturously consummated between persons who could not endure one another for a day in any other relation.
219 Taxes are the chief business of a conqueror of the world.
220 First love is only a little foolishness and a lot of curiosity.
221 It's easier to replace a dead man than a good picture.
222 Cleopatra: Was I right to avenge myself?... Caesar: If one man in all the world can be found, now or forever, to know that you did wrong, that man will have either to conquer the world as I have, or be crucified by it.
223 Go anywhere in England where there are natural, wholesome, contented, and really nice English people; and what do you always find? That the stables are the real centre of the household.
224 Men are always thinking that they are going to do something grandly wicked to their enemies; but when it comes to the point, really bad men are just as rare as really good ones.
225 It does not follow ... that the right to criticize Shakespeare involves the power of writing better plays. And in fact—do not be surprised at my modesty—I do not profess to write better plays.
226 What really flatters a man is that you think him worth flattering.
227 I never expect a soldier to think, sir.
228 Great art is never produced for its own sake. It is too difficult to be worth the effort.
229 When it comes to the point, really bad men are just as rare as really good ones.
230 Give women the vote, and in five years there will be a crushing tax on bachelors.
231 I have to live for others and not for myself: that's middle-class morality.
232 Democracy means the organization of society for the benefit and at the expense of everybody indiscriminately and not for the benefit of a privileged class.
233 Do not do unto others as you would that they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same.
234 I am a Christian. That obliges me to be a Communist.
235 But a mother is like a broomstick or like the sun in the heavens, it does not matter which as far as one's knowledge of her is concerned: the broomstick is there and the sun is there; and whether the child is beaten by it or warmed and enlightened by it, it accepts it as a fact in nature, and does not conceive it as having had youth, passions, and weaknesses, or as still growing, yearning, suffering, and learning.
236 A man who has no office to go to—I don't care who he is—is a trial of which you can have no conception.
237 Christianity as a specific doctrine was slain with Jesus, suddenly and utterly. He was hardly cold in his grave, or high in his heaven (as you please), before the apostles dragged the tradition of him down to the level of the thing it has remained ever since.
238 It's usually pointed out that women are not fit for political power, and ought not to be trusted with a vote because they are politically ignorant, socially prejudiced, narrow-minded, and selfish. True enough, but precisely the same is true of men!
239 The censorship method ... is that of handing the job over to some frail and erring mortal man, and making him omnipotent on the assumption that his official status will make him infallible and omniscient.
240 When two people are under the influence of the most violent, most insane, most delusive, and most transient of passions, they are required to swear that they will remain in that excited, abnormal, and exhausting condition continuously until death do them part.
241 Never waste jealousy on a real man: it is the imaginary man that supplants us all in the long run.
242 We are a nation of governesses.
243 Only in the problem play is there any real drama, because drama is no mere setting up of the camera to nature: it is the presentation in parable of the conflict between Man's will and his environment: in a word, of problem.
244 A pornographic novelist is one who exploits the sexual instinct as a prostitute does. A legitimate sex novel elucidates it or brings out its poetry, tragedy, or comedy.
245 We mustn't be stiff and stand-off, you know. We must be thoroughly democratic, and patronize everybody without distinction of class.
246 He never does a proper thing without giving an improper reason for it.
247 Every doctor will allow a colleague to decimate a whole countryside sooner than violate the bond of professional etiquet by giving him away.
248 I feel nothing but the accursed happiness I have dreaded all my life long: the happiness that comes as life goes, the happiness of yielding and dreaming instead of resisting and doing, the sweetness of the fruit that is going rotten.
249 How can you dare teach a man to read until you've taught him everything else first?
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