When you want genuine music -- music that will come right home to you like a bad quarter, suffuse your system like strychnine whisky, go right through you like Brandreth's pills, ramify your whole constitution like the measles, and break out on your hide like the pin-feather pimples on a picked goose, -- when you want all this, just smash your piano, and invoke the glory-beaming banjo!

There are three kinds of liars: liars, damned liars, and statisticians

The universal brotherhood of man is our most precious possession.

Wine is a clog to the pen, not an inspiration.

Some men worship rank, some worship heroes, some worship power, some worship God, and over these ideals they dispute-but they all worship money.

A lie can make it half way around the world before the truth has time to put its boots on.

The true and lasting genius of humour does not drag you thus to boxes labelled 'pathos,' 'humour,' and show you all the mechanism of the inimitable puppets that are going to perform. How I used to laugh at Simon Tapperwit, and the Wellers, and a host more! But I can't do it now somehow; and time, it seems to me, is the true test of humour. It must be antiseptic.