I never expect a soldier to think.

All religions begin with a revolt against morality, and perish when morality conquers them.

There is nothing so bad or so good that you will not find Englishmen doing it; but you will never find an Englishman in the wrong. He does everything on principle. He fights you on patriotic principles; he robs you on business principles; he enslaves you on imperial principles; he bullies you on manly principles; he supports his king on loyal principles and cuts off his king's head on republican principles.

I have defined the hundred per cent American as ninety-nine per cent an idiot.

The fickleness of the women I love is only equalled by the infernal constancy of the women who love me.

The schoolmaster is the person who takes the children off the parents' hands for a consideration. That is to say, he establishes a child prison, engages a number of employee schoolmasters as turnkeys, and covers up the essential cruelty and unnaturalness of the situation by torturing the children if they do not learn, and calling this process, which is within the capacity of any fool or blackguard, by the sacred name of Teaching.

Marriage is good enough for the lower classes: they have facilities for desertion that are denied to us.