A man of my spiritual intensity does not eat corpses.

The truth sticks in our throats with all the sauces it is served with: it will never go down until we take it without any sauce at all.

Optimistic lies have such immense therapeutic value that a doctor who cannot tell them convincingly has mistaken his profession.

They tell me that So-and-So, who does not write prefaces, is no charlatan. Well, I am. I first caught the ear of the British public on a cart in Hyde Park, to the blaring of brass bands,and this . . . because . . . I am a natural-born mountebank.

Property, said Proudhon, is theft. This is the only perfect truism that has been uttered on the subject.

Even to this day it is easier than it ought to be for me to get a rise out of an American by telling him something about himself which is equally true about every human being on the face of the globe. He at once resents this as a disparagement and an assertion on my part that people in other parts of the globe are not like that, and are loftily superior to such weaknesses.

In a living society every day is a day of judgment; and its recognition as such is not the end of all things but the beginning ofa real civilization.