I don't know if there are men on the moon, but if there are they must be using the earth as their lunatic asylum

Great art is never produced for its own sake. It is too difficult to be worth the effort.

A book is like a child: it is easier to bring it into the world than to control it when it is launched there.

I was always unlawful; I broke the law when I was born because my parents weren't married.

My schooling did me a great deal of harm and no good whatever; it was simply dragging a child's soul through the dirt.

Heaven, as conventionally conceived, is a place so inane, so dull, so useless, so miserable that nobody has ever ventured to describe a whole day in heaven, though plenty of people have described a day at the seaside.

Dogmatic toleration is nonsense: I would no more tolerate the teaching of Calvinism to children if I had power to persecute it than the British Raj tolerated suttee in India. Every civilized authority must draw a line between the tolerable and the intolerable.