The price of ability does not depend on merit but on supply and demand.

If you leave your art, the world will beat you back to it. The world has not an ambition worth sharing, or a prize worth handling.

When you want to put something into your part that is not in the play, you must ask the author-or some other author-to lead up to the interpolation for you. Never forget that the effect of a line may depend not on its delivery, but on something said earlier in the play, either by somebody else or by yourself, and that if you change it, it may be necessary to change the whole first act as well.

If associations to control burglary and murder were tolerated we should take it for granted that the members should all be burglers and murderers.

Revolutions have never lightened the burden of tyranny; they have only shifted it to another shoulder.

Those who talk most about the blessings of marriage and the constancy of its vows are the very people who declare that if the chain were broken and the prisoners left free to choose, the whole social fabric would fly asunder. You cannot have the argument both ways. If the prisoner is happy, why lock him in? If he is not, why pretend that he is?

The heretic is always better dead. And mortal eyes cannot distinguish the saint from the heretic.