There is only one honest impulse at the bottom of Puritanism, and that is the impulse to punish the man with a superior capacity for happiness |
There is only one justification for having sinned, and that is to be glad of it |
There is something even more valuable to civilization than wisdom, and that is character |
They have taken the care and upbringing of children out of the hands of parents, where it belongs, and thrown it upon a gang of irresponsible and unintelligent quacks |
Time is a great legalizer, even in the field of morals |
Time is the great legalizer, even in the field of morals. |
To be in love is merely to be in a perpetual state of anesthesia - to mistake an ordinary young man for a Greek god or an ordinary young woman for a goddess |
To be in love is merely to be in a state of perceptual anesthesia. |
To denounce moralizing out of hand is to pronounce a moral judgment |
To die for an idea; it is unquestionably noble. But how much nobler it would be if men died for ideas that were true! |
To expect defeat is nine-tenths of defeat itself. |
To wage a war for a purely moral reason is as absurd as to ravish a woman for a purely moral reason |
Truth would quickly cease to become stranger than fiction, once we got as used to it |
Truth: Something somehow discreditable to someone |
Try to imagine a Shakespeare beset by fundamentalism, or a Goethe trying to work with the Ku Klux Klan roaring under his door |