Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all others because you were born in it.

If you're not producing as much as you consume, or perhaps a little more, then clearly we cannot use the big organization of our society for the purpose of keeping you alive, because your life does not benefit us, and it can't be of very much use to yourself.

Only on paper has humanity yet achieved glory, beauty, truth, knowledge, virtue, and abiding love.

We have no more right to consume happiness without producing it than to consume wealth without producing it.

She had lost the art of conversation but not, unfortunately, the power of speech.

A fool's brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence University education.

You are going to let the fear of poverty govern you life and your reward will be that you will eat, but you will not live.

I learned long ago, never to wrestle with a pig. You get dirty, and besides, the pig likes it.

Youth is a wonderful thing. What a crime to waste it on children.

It is the mark of a truly intelligent person to be moved by statistics.

Beauty is all very well at first sight; but who ever looks at it when it has been in the house three days?

The art of government is the organisation of idolatry.

We learn from experience that men never learn anything from experience.

There is no sincerer love than the love of food.

Every man over forty is a scoundrel.

Beauty is a short-lived tyranny.

Life isn't about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.

Success does not consist in never making mistakes but in never making the same one a second time.

Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.

Beware of false knowledge; it is more dangerous than ignorance.

I would like to take you seriously, but to do so would be an affront to your intelligence.

Everything happens to everybody sooner or later if there is time enough.

Men are wise in proportion, not to their experience, but to their capacity for experience.

If all the economists were laid end to end, they'd never reach a conclusion.

Lack of money is the root of all evil.

The fickleness of the women I love is only equalled by the infernal constancy of the women who love me.

In a battle all you need to make you fight is a little hot blood and the knowledge that it's more dangerous to lose than to win.

I dislike feeling at home when I am abroad.

Caesar was a man of great common sense and good taste, meaning thereby a man without originality or moral courage.

Just do what must be done. This may not be happiness, but it is greatness.

Marriage is an alliance entered into by a man who can't sleep with the window shut, and a woman who can't sleep with the window open.

Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh.

A little learning is a dangerous thing, but we must take that risk because a little is as much as our biggest heads can hold.

Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.

A government that robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.

Hell is full of musical amateurs.

First love is only a little foolishness and a lot of curiosity.

There is only one religion, though there are a hundred versions of it.

Animals are my friends... and I don't eat my friends.

The idea of personal salvation is intensely repugnant to me when it is not absurd. Imagine Roosevelt, the big brute, preserving his personality in a future state and swaggering about as a celestial Rough Rider!

Independence? That's middle class blasphemy. We are all dependent on one another, every soul of us on earth.

Youth is wasted on the young.

The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.

Do not waste your time on Social Questions. What is the matter with the poor is Poverty; what is the matter with the rich is Uselessness.

The things most people want to know about are usually none of their business.

Clever and attractive women do not want to vote; they are willing to let men govern as long as they govern men.

I am afraid we must make the world honest before we can honestly say to our children that honesty is the best policy.

Science never solves a problem without creating ten more.

Democracy substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few.

Power does not corrupt men; fools, however, if they get into a position of power, corrupt power.

Never fret for an only son, the idea of failure will never occur to him.

If I own a large part of Scotland, I can turn the people off the land practically into the sea or across the sea. I can take women in child-bearing and throw them into the snow and leave them there. That has been done. I can do it for no better reason than I think it is better to shoot deer on the land than allow people to live on it.

Give a man health and a course to steer, and he'll never stop to trouble about whether he's happy or not.

Use your health, even to the point of wearing it out. That is what it is for. Spend all you have before you die; do not outlive yourself.

Marriage is an alliance entered into by a man who can't sleep with the window shut, and a woman who can't sleep with the window open.

Old men are dangerous: it doesn't matter to them what is going to happen to the world.

No man ever believes that the Bible means what it says: He is always convinced that it says what he means.

Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine and at last you create what you will.

It is a curious sensation: the sort of pain that goes mercifully beyond our powers of feeling. When your heart is broken, your boats are burned: nothing matters any more. It is the end of happiness and the beginning of peace.

A happy family is but an earlier heaven.

One man that has a mind and knows it can always beat ten men who haven't and don't.

Marriage is popular because it combines the maximum of temptation with the maximum of opportunity.

If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience.

All great truths begin as blasphemies.

The best place to find God is in a garden. You can dig for him there.

Peace is not only better than war, but infinitely more arduous.

The great advantage of a hotel is that it is a refuge from home life.

The only service a friend can really render is to keep up your courage by holding up to you a mirror in which you can see a noble image of yourself.

You use a glass mirror to see your face; you use works of art to see your soul.

Marriage is good enough for the lower classes: they have facilities for desertion that are denied to us.

Parentage is a very important profession, but no test of fitness for it is ever imposed in the interest of the children.

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

Beware of the man who does not return your blow: he neither forgives you nor allows you to forgive yourself.

Life levels all men. Death reveals the eminent.

There is no subject on which more dangerous nonsense is talked and thought than marriage.

You'll never have a quiet world till you knock the patriotism out of the human race.

Very few people can afford to be poor.

Alcohol is the anesthesia by which we endure the operation of life.

What we want is to see the child in pursuit of knowledge, and not knowledge in pursuit of the child.

Home life is no more natural to us than a cage is natural to a cockatoo.

Hegel was right when he said that we learn from history that man can never learn anything from history.