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What is self-control? It is nothing but a highly developed vital sense, dominating and regulating the mere appetites. To overlook the very existence of this supreme sense; to miss the obvious inference that it is the quality that distinguishes the fittest to survive.
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Don't ask me for promises until I know what I am promising.
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There is a terrible truthfulness about photography that sometimes makes a thing look ridiculous.
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A thing that nobody believes cannot be proved too often.
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We are told that when Jehovah created the world he saw that it was good what would he say now...
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A modern gentleman is necessarily the enemy of his country. Even in war he does not fight to defend it, but to prevent his power of preying on it from passing to a foreigner.
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Who is this Baby Ruth? And what does she do?
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Hell is not all paved with bad intentions.
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People exaggerate the value of things they haven't got everybody worships truth and unselfishness because they have no experience with them.
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I am highly susceptible to the force of all truly religious music, especially to the music of my own church, the church of Shelley, Michelangelo, and Beethoven.
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Remember that you are a human being with a soul and the divine gift of articulate speech: that your native language is the language of Shakespeare and Milton and The Bible; and don't sit there crooning like a bilious pigeon.
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What a man is depends on his character; but what he does, and what we think of what he does, depends on his circumstances.
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Let wife and child perish, and lay bricks for your last crust, rather than part with an iota of your copyrights.
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An actress is not a lady; at least, when she is, she is not an actress.
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There is only one universal passion fear.
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Unless comedy touches me as well as amuses me, it leaves me with a sense of having wasted my evening. I go to the theatre to be moved to laughter, not to be tickled or bustled into it.
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Golf is typical capitalist luncay.
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Just as I cannot remember any time when I could not read and write, I cannot remember any time when I did not exercise my imagination in daydreams about women.
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You have a choice of trusting the natural stability of gold, or the honesty and intelligence of members of government.
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Social questions are too sectional, too topical, too temporal to move a man to the mighty effort which is needed to produce greatpoetry. Prison reform may nerve Charles Reade to produce an effective and businesslike prose melodrama; but it could never produce Hamlet, Faust, or Peer Gynt.
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When you prevent me from doing anything I want to do, that is persecution; when I prevent you from doing anything you want to do, that is law, order, and morals.
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I hate performers who debase great works of art; I long for their annihilation.
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All religions begin with a revolt against morality, and perish when morality conquers them.
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We have in England a curious belief in first-rate people, meaning all the people we do not know; and this consoles us for the undeniable second-rateness of the people we do know.