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If you teach a man anything, he will never learn.
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The notion that Nature does not proceed by jumps is only one of the budget of plausible lies that we call classical education. Nature always proceeds by jumps. She may spend twenty thousand years making up her mind to jump; but when she makes it up at last, the jump is big enough to take us into a new age.
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Life is not meant to be easy, my child; but take courage: it can be delightful.
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Socialism never arises in the earlier phases of capitalism, as, for instance, among the pioneers of civilisation in a country where there is plenty of land available for private appropriation by the last comer.
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The function of comedy is to dispelunconsciousness by turning the searchlight of the keenest moral and intellectual analysisright on to it.
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The faults of the burglar are the qualities of the financier.
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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.
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They tell me that So-and-So, who does not write prefaces, is no charlatan. Well, I am. I first caught the ear of the British public on a cart in Hyde Park, to the blaring of brass bands,and this . . . because . . . I am a natural-born mountebank.
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Wicked people means people who have no love: therefore, they have no shame. They have the power to ask love because the don't need it: they have the power to offer it because they have none to give.
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I am justified. For I chose wisdom and the knowledge of good and evil; and now there is no evil; and wisdom and good are one. It is enough.
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Those who understand the steam engine and the electric telegraph spend their lives in trying to replace them with something better.
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Modern poverty is not the poverty that was blest in the Sermon on the Mount.
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Time enough to think of the future when you haven't any future to think of.
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There are some experiences in life which should not be demanded twice from any man, and one of them is listening to the Brahms Requiem.
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No man who is occupied in doing a very difficult thing, and doing it very well, ever loses his self-respect.
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The difference between a lady and a flower girl is not how she behaves, but how she’s treated.
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Ye poor posterity, think not that ye are the first. Other fools before ye have seen the sun rise and set, and the moon change her shape and her hour. As they were so ye are; and yet not so great; for the pyramids my people built stand to this day; whilst the dustheaps on which ye slave, and which ye call empires, scatter in the wind even as ye pile your dead sons' bodies on them to make yet more dust.
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I would exchange every painting of Christ for one snapshot.
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If you do things merely because you think some other fool expects you to do them, and he expects you to do them because he thinks you expect him to expect you to do them, it will end in everybody doing what nobody wants to do, which is in my opinion a silly state of things.
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You see, lots of the real people can't do it at all: they're such fools that they think style comes by nature to people in their position; and so they never learn. There's always something professional about doing a thing superlatively well.
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Freedom, my good girl, means being able to count on how other people will behave.
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Morals are a luxury of the rich.
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Idiots are always in favour of inequality of income (their only chance of eminence), and the really great in favour of equality.
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When I was young, I observed that nine out of ten things I did were failures. So I did ten times more work.