“We must make the world honest before we can honestly say to our children that honesty is the best policy.”
“A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.”
“A man of great common sense and good taste -- meaning thereby a man without originality or moral courage.”
“The liar's punishment is not in the least that he is not believed, but that he cannot believe anyone else.”
“Some men see things as they are and say, ''Why?'' I of dream things that never were, and say, ''Why not?''”
“The only way to avoid being miserable is not to have enough leisure to wonder whether you are happy or not.”
“Man is the only animal which esteems itself rich in proportion to the number and voracity of its parasites.”
“No man who is occupied in doing a very difficult thing, and doing it very well, ever loses his self-respect.”
“My father must have had some elementary education for he could read and write and keep accounts inaccurately”
“We have no more right to consume happiness without producing it than to consume wealth without producing it.”
“When a man wants to murder a tiger he calls it sport; when a tiger wants to murder him he calls it ferocity.”
“It is a woman's business to get married as soon as possible, and a man's to keep unmarried as long as he can.”
“A man who has no office to go to -- I don't care who he is -- is a trial of which you can have no conception.”
“Censorship ends in logical completeness when nobody is allowed to read any books except the books nobody reads.”
“Clever and attractive women do not want to vote; they are willing to let men govern as long as they govern men.”
“Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it.”
“It is difficult, if not impossible, for most people to think otherwise than in the fashion of their own period.”
“All progress is initiated by challenging current conceptions, and executed by supplanting existing institutions.”
“The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and about all time.”
“An election is a moral horror, as bad as a battle except for the blood; a mud bath for every soul concerned in it.”
“There is nothing that can be changed more completely than human nature when the job is taken in hand early enough.”
“My method is to take the utmost trouble to find the right thing to say, and then to say it with the utmost levity.”
“If you must hold yourself up to your children as an object lesson, hold yourself up as a warning and not an example.”
“If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience!”
“I showed my appreciation of my native land in the usual Irish way: by getting out of it as soon as I possibly could.”
“I'm not a teacher: only a fellow-traveler of whom you asked the way. I pointed ahead -- ahead of myself as well as you.”
“Democracy is a form of government that substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few.”
“Suppose the world were only one of God's jokes, would you work any the less to make it a good joke instead of a bad one?”
“You don't learn to hold your own in the world by standing on guard, but by attacking and getting well hammered yourself.”
“Youth, which is forgiven everything, forgives itself nothing: age, which forgives itself everything, is forgiven nothing.”