Your heart and your mouth wil be in two separate parts of your body if you again forget in whose presence you stand.

I showed my appreciation of my native land in the usual Irish way: by getting out of it as soon as I possibly could.

We are members one of another; so that you cannot injure or help your neighbor without injuring or helping yourself.

The capacity of any conqueror is more likely than not to be an illusion produced by the incapacity of his adversary.

What is the use of straining after an amiable view of things, when a cynical view is most likely to be the true one?.

Communism, being the lay form of Catholicism, and indeed meaning the same thing, has never had any lack of chaplains.

I am afraid we must make the world honest before we can honestly say to our children that honesty is the best policy.

There is at bottom only one genuinely scientific treatment for all diseases, and that is to stimulate the phagocytes.

Until the men of action clear out the talkers we who have social consciences are at the mercy of those who have none.

Both optimists and pessimists contribute to society. The optimist invents the aeroplane, the pessimist the parachute.

My schooling did me a great deal of harm and no good whatever; it was simply dragging a child's soul through the dirt.

The problem with the press is that they can't tell the difference between a bicycle crash and the end of civilization.

Don't waste time collecting other people's autographs; rather devote it to making your own autograph worth collecting.

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.

Treat a friend as a person who may someday become your enemy; an enemy as a person who may someday become your friend.

We don't bother much about dress and manners in England, because as a nation we don't dress well and we've no manners.

The great dramatist has something better to do than to amuse either himself or his audience. He has to interpret life.

You have a choice of trusting the natural stability of gold, or the honesty and intelligence of members of government.

I'm not a teacher: only a fellow traveler of whom you asked the way. I pointed ahead - ahead of myself as well as you.

The trouble with the media is that it seems unable to distinguish between the end of the world and a bicycle accident.

If the governments devalue the currency in order to betray all creditors, you politely call this procedure 'inflation'.

The degree of tolerance attainable at any moment depends on the strain under which society is maintaining its cohesion.

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

Vulgarity is a necessary part of a complete author's equipment; and the clown is sometimes the best part of the circus.

If all you are going to do in life are the things that are convenient and comfortable, the great things never get done.

Nothing soothes me more after a long and maddening course of pianoforte recitals than to sit and have my teeth drilled.

You practically do not use semicolons at all. This is a symptom of mental defectiveness, probably induced by camp life.

The function of the actor is to make the audience imagine for the moment that real things are happening to real people.

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

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

Money is the counter that enables life to be lived socially; it is life as truly as sovereigns and banknotes are money.

To make Democracy work, you need an aristocratic democracy. To make Aristocracy work, you need a democratic aristocracy.

Parentage is a very important profession, but no test of fitness for it is ever imposed in the interest of the children.

Suppose the world were only one of God's jokes, would you work any the less to make it a good joke instead of a bad one?

I like flowers, I also like children, but I do not chop their heads off and keep them in bowls of water around the house.

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

Miracles, in the sense of phenomena we cannot explain, surround us on every hand: life itself is the miracle of miracles.

Seemingly unreasonable people attempt to adapt the world to themselves. Much progress, therefore, depends on such people.

You don't learn to hold your own in the world by standing on guard, but by attacking, and getting well hammered yourself.

In the right key one can say anything. In the wrong key, nothing: the only delicate part is the establishment of the key.

It is nearly 50 years since I was assured by a conclave of doctors that if I did not eat meat I should die of starvation.

Assasination on the scaffold is the worst form of assasination, because there it is invested with the approval of society.

What a man is depends on his character; but what he does, and what we think of what he does, depends on his circumstances.

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

If you begin by sacrificing yourself to those you love, you will end by hating those to whom you have sacrificed yourself.

You are going to let the fear of poverty govern you life and your reward will be that you will eat, but you will not live.

Any sort of plain speaking is better than the nauseous sham good fellowship our democratic public men get up for shop use.

To the person with a toothache, even if the world is tottering, there is nothing more important than a visit to a dentist.

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

While we ourselves are the living graves of murdered animals, how can we expect any ideal living conditions on this earth?

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