I must have been an insufferable child; all children are.

Life is a flame that is always burning itself out; but it catches fire again every time a child is born. Life is greater than death, and hope than despair.

In an article on Bunyan lately published in the "Contemporary Review" - the only article on the subject worth reading on the subject I ever saw (yes, thank you, I am familiar with Macaulay's patronizing prattle about "The Pilgrim's Progress") etc.

The nation's morals are like its teeth: the more decayed they are the more it hurts to touch them.

The notion that persons should be safe from extermination as long as they do not commit willful murder, or levy war against the Crown, or kidnap, or throw vitriol, is not only to limit social responsibility unnecessarily, and to privilege the large range of intolerable misconduct that lies outside them, but to divert attention from the essential justification for extermination, which is always incorrigible social incompatibility and nothing else.

You will think less of the art, when you know the artist

Idiots are always in favour of inequality of income (their only chance of eminence), and the really great in favour of equality.