whereas, up to the present, there is only one known way of getting born, there are endless ways of getting killed.

Variety, individuality, peculiarity, eccentricity and indeed crankiness are agreeable to the British mind; they make life more interesting.

No share-pusher could vend his worthless stock, if he could not count on meeting, in his prospective victim, an unscrupulous avarice as vicious as his own, but stupider. Every time a man expects, as he says, his money to work for him, he is expecting other people to work for him.

None of us feels the true love of God till we realize how wicked we are. But you can't teach people that - they have to learn by experience.

[O]ne can scarcely be frightened off writing what one wants to write for fear an obscure reviewer should patronise one on that account.

A person who tells a secret, swearing the recipient to secrecy in turn, is asking of the other person a discretion which he is abrogating himself.

To foment grievance and to set men at variance is the trade by which agitators thrive and journalists make money.