Only on paper has humanity yet achieved glory, beauty, truth, knowledge, virtue, and abiding love.

Life contains but two tragedies. One is not to get your heart's desire; the other is to get it.

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.

Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.

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

Assassination on the scaffold is the worst form of assassination.

War can so easily be gilt with romance and heroism and solemn national duty and patriotism and the like by persons whose superficial literary and oratorical talent covers an abyss of Godforsaken folly.