On the whole, I should say that the person who likes to lie should never, in any circumstances, be allowed to. Leave the lying to the people who hate it. You will not find them indulging often.

democracy always makes for materialism, because the only kind of equality that you can guarantee to a whole people is, broadly speaking, physical.

Every one knows about the young man who falls in love with the chorus-girl because she can kick his hat off, and his sister's friends can't or won't. But the youth who marries her, expecting that all her departures from convention will be as agile or as delightful to him as that, is still the classic example of folly.

Most men have always wanted as much as they could get; and possession has always blunted the fine edge of their altruism.

... when you make it a moral necessity for the young to dabble in all the subjects that the books on the top shelf are written about, you kill two very large birds with one stone: you satisfy precious curiosities, and you make them believe that they know as much about life as people who really know something. If college boys are solemnly advised to listen to lectures on prostitution, they will listen; and who is to blame if some time, in a less moral moment, they profit by their information?

men demand everything and are not satisfied until sex blinds them into thinking they have got it.

All violations of essential privacy are brutalizing.