The Infinite Library

“Life isn't about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.”

“Make it a rule never to give a child a book you would not read yourself.”

“A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.”

“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.”

“If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they'll kill you.”

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

“If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience.”

“It is easy - terribly easy - to shake a man's faith in himself. To take advantage of that, to break a man's spirit is devil's work.”

“When a man wants to murder a tiger he calls it sport; when a tiger wants to murder him he calls it ferocity.”

“Power does not corrupt men; fools, however, if they get into a position of power, corrupt power.”

“A pessimist is a man who thinks everybody is as nasty as himself, and hates them for it.”

“England and America are two countries separated by the same language.”

“It is most unwise for people in love to marry.”

“If a woman can, by careful selection of a father and nourishment of herself, produce a citizen with efficient senses, sound organs and a good digestion, she should clearly be secured a sufficient reward for that natural service to make her willing to undertake and repeat it.”

“It's all that the young can do for the old, to shock them and keep them up to date.”

“If women were particular about men's characters, they would never get married at all.”

“Better never than late.”

“Democracy is a device that ensures we shall be governed no better than we deserve.”

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

“I want to destroy ownership in order that possession and enjoyment may be raised to the highest point in every section of the community.”

“Every person who has mastered a profession is a skeptic concerning it.”

“The secret of being miserable is to have leisure to bother about whether you are happy or not. The cure for it is occupation.”

“Lack of money is the root of all evil.”

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

“Capitalism has destroyed our belief in any effective power but that of self interest backed by force.”

“Assassination is the extreme form of censorship.”

“When people shake their heads because we are living in a restless age, ask them how they would like to life in a stationary one, and do without change.”

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

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

“I am a Christian. That obliges me to be a Communist.”

“Very few people can afford to be poor.”

“You have learnt something. That always feels at first as if you had lost something.”

“Schools and schoolmasters, as we have them today, are not popular as places of education and teachers, but rather prisons and turnkeys in which children are kept to prevent them disturbing and chaperoning their parent.”

“Youth is a wonderful thing. What a crime to waste it on children.”

“This is true joy of life-the being used for a purpose that is recognized by yourself as a right one, instead of being a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances, complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.”

“The test of a man or woman's breeding is how they behave in a quarrel.”

“If all the economists were laid end to end, they'd never reach a conclusion.”

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

“If I were a woman, I'd simply refuse to speak to any man or do anything for men until I'd got the vote.”

“The man with toothache thinks everyone happy whose teeth are sound. The poverty stricken man makes the same mistake about the rich man.”

“Parentage is a very important profession, but no test of fitness, for it is ever imposed in the interests of the Children.”

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

“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.”

“Better keep yourself clean and bright; you are the window through which you must see the world.”

“There are two tragedies in life. One is to lose your heart's desire. The other is to gain it.”

“Property is organized robbery.”

“All great truths began as blasphemies.”

“Cruelty would be delicious if one could only find some sort of cruelty that didn't really hurt.”