The moment we want to believe something, we suddenly see all the arguments for it, and become blind to the arguments against it.

The secret to success is to offend the greatest number of people.

Without art, the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable.

The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it.

Find enough clever things to say, and you're a Prime Minister; write them down and you're a Shakespeare.

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

Miracles, in the sense of phenomena we cannot explain, surround us on every hand: life itself is the miracle of miracles.

If you injure your neighbour, better not do it by halves.

The British soldier can stand up to anything except the British War Office.

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.

I enjoy convalescence. It is the part that makes the illness worth while.

Choose silence of all virtues, for by it you hear other men's imperfections, and conceal your own.

You see things; and you say "Why?" But I dream things that never were; and I say "Why not?"

Do not do unto others as you expect they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same.

Assassination is the extreme form of censorship.

Oh, the tiger will love you. There is no sincerer love than the love of food.

I'm an atheist and I thank God for it.

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

In this world there is always danger for those who are afraid of it.

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

When a man says money can do anything, that settles it: he hasn't got any.

We are all dependent on one another, every soul of us on earth.

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

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

The possibilities are numerous once we decide to act and not react.

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

Self-sacrifice enables us to sacrifice other people without blushing.

An election is a moral horror, as bad as a battle except for the blood; a mud bath for every soul concerned in it.

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

Better never than late.

Democracy is a form of government that substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few.

When a stupid man is doing something he is ashamed of, he always declares that it is his duty.

There is no satisfaction in hanging a man who does not object to it.

If there was nothing wrong in the world there wouldn't be anything for us to do.

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

I have to live for others and not for myself: that's middle-class morality.

The love of economy is the root of all virtue.

Men have to do some awfully mean things to keep up their respectability.

A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.

Americans adore me and will go on adoring me until I say something nice about them.

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

England and America are two countries separated by the same language.

In heaven an angel is nobody in particular.

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

No man who is occupied in doing a very difficult thing, and doing it very well, ever loses his self-respect.

Fashions, after all, are only induced epidemics.

Reading made Don Quixote a gentleman, but believing what he read made him mad.

It's so hard to know what to do when one wishes earnestly to do right.

Property is organized robbery.