There is, on the whole, nothing on earth intended for innocent people so horrible as a school. To begin with, it is a prison. But in some respects more cruel than a prison. In a prison, for instance, you are not forced to read books written by the warders and the governor. . . .In the prison you are not forced to sit listening to turnkeys discoursing without charm or interest on subjects that they don't understand and don't care about, and therefore incapable of making you understand or care about. In a prison they may torture your body; but they do not torture your brains.

Every fool believes what his teachers tell him, and calls his credulity science or morality as confidently as his father called it divine revelation.

I am the most spontaneous speaker in the world because every word, every gesture, and every retort has been carefully rehearsed.

I would exchange every painting of Christ for one snapshot.

To endure the pain of living, we all drug ourselves more or less with gin, with literature, with superstitions, with romance, with idealism, political, sentimental, and moral, with every possible preparation of that universal hashish: imagination.

Assassination is the extreme form of censorship; and it seems hard to justify an incitement to it on anti-censorial principles.

The most sublime courage I have ever witnessed has been among that class too poor to know they possessed it, and too humble for the world to discover it.