- What will history say? History, sir, will tell lies, as usual.
- Power does not corrupt men; fools, however, if they get into a position of power, corrupt power.
- All great truths begin as blasphemies.
- Both optimists and pessimists contribute to society. The optimist invented the aeroplane, the pessimist the parachute.
- Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.
- Democracy is a device that ensures we shall be governed no better than we deserve.
- Democracy cannot rise above the level of the human material of which its electors are made.
- Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.
- People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and if they can’t find them, make them.
- I think human life is always worth saving, whoever the human being may be.
- Do not do unto others as you would that they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same.
- When you read biographies, remember that the truth is never fit for publication.
- Reading made Don Quixote a gentleman, but believing what he read made him mad.
- When we learn the laws of life we undergo a series of humiliations, as when we learn to skate. The only way is to laugh at yourself with the lookers-on.
- In this world danger always threatens the one who is afraid.
- That is the secret of heroism: never to let the fear of death govern your life.
- Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all others because you were born in it.
- Love is a gross exaggeration of the difference between one person and everybody else.
- The greatest crime is impunity.
- It is dangerous to be sincere unless you are also stupid.
- I was a freethinker before I knew how to think.
- My way of joking is to tell the truth. It is the funniest joke in the world.
- You have to make people laugh sometimes, to distract them from hanging you.
- When a man wants to murder a tiger, he calls it sport; when the tiger wants to murder him, he calls it ferocity.
- Virtue consists not in the absence of passions, but in the control of them.
- Dancing is a perpendicular expression of a horizontal desire.
- I do not like to fight; I like to win.
- A living failure is better than a dead masterpiece.
- If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples, then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas.
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