Everything I eat has been proved by some doctor or other to be a deadly poison, and everything I don't eat has been proved to be indispensable for life. But I go marching on.

The notion that Nature does not proceed by jumps is only one of the budget of plausible lies that we call classical education. Nature always proceeds by jumps. She may spend twenty thousand years making up her mind to jump; but when she makes it up at last, the jump is big enough to take us into a new age.

We don't bother much about dress and manners in England, because as a nation we don't dress well and we've no manners.

I never accepted a knighthood because to me, is honour enough?

The haughty American nation ... makes the Negro clean its boots and then proves the moral and physical inferiority of the Negro by the fact that he is a bootblack.

German and Spanish are accessible to foreigners: English is not accessible even to Englishmen.

Life is too short for men to take it seriously.