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Do not mistake your objection to defeat for an objection to fighting, your objection to being a slave for an objection to slavery, your objection to not being as rich as your neighbor for an objection to poverty. The cowardly, the insubordinate, and the envious share your objections.
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Self-denial is not a virtue: it is only the effect of prudence on rascality.
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Socialism is the same as Communism, only better English.
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Most married couples spend the whole day apart, the woman in the house, the man in the office or study or workshop.
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People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don't believe in circumstances.
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Which painting in the National Gallery would I save if there was a fire? The one nearest the door of course.
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Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine and at last you create what you will.
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Forgive him, for he believes that the customs of his tribe are the laws of nature!
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The perfect love affair is one which is conducted entirely by post.
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What the world calls originality is only an unaccustomed method of tickling it.
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Criminals do not die by the hands of the law. They die by the hands of other men.
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I can't talk religion to a man with bodily hunger in his eyes.
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Hell is a place where you have nothing to do but amuse yourself.
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Love is an appetite which, like all other appetites, is destroyed for the moment by its gratification.
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Even under the most perfect Social Democracy we should, without Communism, still be living like hogs, except that each hog would get his fair share of grub.... Whilst we are hogs, let us at least be well-fed, healthy, reciprocally useful hogs, instead of--well, instead of the sort we are at present.
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There is nothing more dangerous than the conscience of a bigot.
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God help England if she had no Scots to think for her!
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When we know what God is, we shall be gods ourselves.
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Financiers live in a world of illusion. They count on something which they call the capital of the country, which has no existence.
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Vulgarity is a necessary part of a complete author's equipment; and the clown is sometimes the best part of the circus.
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Revolutionary movements attract those who are not good enough for established institutions as well as those who are too good for them.
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When a man says money can do anything, that settles it: he hasn't got any.
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It is not the sale of my soul that troubles me: I have sold it too often to care about that. I have sold it for a professorship. I have sold it for an income. … What is all human conduct but the daily and hourly sale of our souls for trifles?
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He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches.