It is easy—terribly easy—to shake a man’s faith in himself. To take advantage of that to break a man’s spirit is devil’s work.

It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman hate or despise him.

It is long and hard and painful to create life: it is short and easy to steal the life others have made.

It is most unwise for people in love to marry.

It is not necessary to replace a guillotined criminal: it is necessary to replace a guillotined social system.

It is the deed that teaches, not the name we give it. Murder and capital punishment are not opposites that cancel one another, but similars that breed their kind.

It took me twenty years of studied self-restraint, aided by the natural decay of my faculties, to make myself dull enough to be accepted as a serious person by the British public.

It was from Handel that I learned that style consists in force of assertion. 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 litterateur, or a musical confectioner, or a painter of fans with cupids and coquettes. Handel had power.

It’s all that the young can do for the old, to shock them and keep them up to date.

It’s usually pointed out that women are not fit for political power, and ought not to be trusted with a vote because they are politically ignorant, socially prejudiced, narrow-minded, and selfish. True enough, but precisely the same is true of men!