You see things; and you say, ‘Why?’ But I dream things that never were; and I say, ‘Why not?

A cigarette is a pinch of tobacco rolled in paper with fire at one end and a fool at the other.

Such poverty as we have today in all our great cities degrades the poor, and infects with its degradation the whole neighborhood in which they live. And whatever can degrade a neighborhood can degrade a country and a continent and finally the whole civilized world, which is only a large neighborhood.

Alcohol is the anesthesia by which we endure the operation of life.

The wheels are turning, but the hamsters are all dead. Make it idiot-proof and someone will make a better idiot. I learned long ago, never to wrestle with a pig, you get dirty; and besides, the pig likes it.

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.

I showed my appreciation of my native land in the usual Irish way: by getting out of it as soon as I possibly could.