Polemicist Quotes

“Property, said Proudhon, is theft. This is the only perfect truism that has been uttered on the subject.”

“Audacious ribald: your laughter will finish in hideous boredom before morning.”

“Would the world ever have been made if its maker had been afraid of making trouble?Making life means making trouble. There’s only one way of escaping trouble; and that’s killing things.”

“Your heart and your mouth wil be in two separate parts of your body if you again forget in whose presence you stand.”

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”

“Remember that the progress of the world depends on your knowing better than your elders.”

“Being hurt by someone you truly care about leaves a hole in you heart that only love can fill.”

“Man is unique in that he has plans, purpose and goals which require the need for criteria of choice. The need for ethical value is within man whose future may largely be determined by the choice he make”

“This souls'prison we call England.”

“Only in books has mankind known perfect truth, love and beauty.”

“It is the end of happiness and the beginning of peace.”

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

“I shall always be a flower girl to Professor Higgins, because he always treats me as a flower girl, and always will; but I know I can be a lady to you, because you always treat me as a lady, and always will.”

“If you can say a thing with one stroke, unanswerably you have style; if not, you are at best a marchande de plaisir; a decorative litt”

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

“Even if animal experimentation was proved to be of value, it would be morally wrong.”

“Let wife and child perish, and lay bricks for your last crust, rather than part with an iota of your [copy]rights.”

“A photographer is like a cod, which produces a million eggs in order that one may reach maturity.”

“I can think of no other edifice constructed by man as altruistic as a lighthouse. They were built only to serve.”

“For the pre-Darwinian age had come to be regarded as a Dark Age in which men still believed that the book of Genesis was a standard scientific treatise, and that the only additions to it were Galileo'a demonstration of Leonardo da Vinci's simple remark that the earth is a moon of the sun, Sir Humphrey Davy's invention of the safety lamp, the discovery of electricity, the application of steam to industrial purposes, and the penny post.”

“Like fingerprints, all marriages are different.”

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

“All Artists are Anarchists.”

“I was taught when I was young that if people would only love one another, all would be well with the world. I found when I tried to put that into practice, not only were other people seldom lovable but I wasn't very lovable myself.”

“There is, on the whole, nothing on earth intended for innocent people so horrible as a school. To begin with, it is a prison. But in some respects more cruel than a prison. In a prison, for instance, you are not forced to read books written by the warders and the governor. . . .In the prison you are not forced to sit listening to turnkeys discoursing without charm or interest on subjects that they don't understand and don't care about, and therefore incapable of making you understand or care about. In a prison they may torture your body; but they do not torture your brains.”