They have taken the care and upbringing of children out of the hands of parents, where it belongs, and thrown it upon a gang of irresponsible and unintelligent quacks.

The true function of art is to criticize, embellish and edit nature… the artist is a sort of impassioned proof-reader, blue penciling the bad spelling of God.

The extortions and oppressions of government will go on so long as such bare fraudulence deceives and disarms the victims; so long as they are ready to swallow the immemorial official theory that protesting against the stealings of the archbishop's secretary's nephew's mistress' illegitimate son is a sin against the Holy Ghost.

The ideal Government of all reflective men, from Aristotle onward, is one which lets the individual alone - one which barely escapes being no government at all.

What are the characters that I discern most clearly in the so-called Anglo-Saxon type of man? I may answer at once that two stickout above all others. One is his curious and apparently incurable incompetence--his congenital inability to do any difficult thing easily and well, whether it be isolating a bacillus or writing a sonata. The other is his astounding susceptibility to fears and alarms--in short, his hereditary cowardice.... There is no record in history of any Anglo-Saxon nation entering upon any great war without allies.

Whenever I write anything that sets up controversy its meaning is distorted almost instantly. Even the editorial writers of newspapers seem to be unable to understand the plainest sentence.

The truth that survives is simply the lie that is pleasantest to believe.