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.

Defeatism is the wretchedest of policies.

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

Men get tired of everything, of heaven no less than of hell; and that all history is nothing but a record of the oscillations of the world between these two extremes. An epoch is but a swing of the pendulum; and each generation thinks the world is progressing because it is always moving.

The educated man is a greater nuisance than the uneducated one.

I don't know if there are men on the moon, but if there are they must be using the earth as their lunatic asylum

I was always unlawful; I broke the law when I was born because my parents weren't married.