When you want to put something into your part that is not in the play, you must ask the author-or some other author-to lead up to the interpolation for you. Never forget that the effect of a line may depend not on its delivery, but on something said earlier in the play, either by somebody else or by yourself, and that if you change it, it may be necessary to change the whole first act as well.

If I refuse to allow my leg to be amputated, its mortification and my death may prove that I was wrong; but if I let the leg go, nobody can ever prove that it would not have mortified had I been obstinate. Operation is therefore the safe side for the surgeon as well as the lucrative side.

An Englishman does everything on principle: he fights you on patriotic principles; he robs you on business principles; he enslaves you on imperial principles.

The art of government is the organisation of idolatry.

I can think of no other edifice constructed by man as altruistic as a lighthouse. They were built only to serve.

What Englishman will give his mind to politics as long as he can afford to keep a motor car?

It is the highest creatures who take the longest to mature, and are the most helpless during their immaturity.