Bernard Quotes

To make Democracy work, you need an aristocratic democracy. To make Aristocracy work, you need a democratic aristocracy.

Bible worship, though at its best it may achieve sublimity by keeping its head in the skies, may also make itself both ridiculousand dangerous by having its feet off the ground.

My schooling did me a great deal of harm and no good whatever; it was simply dragging a child's soul through the dirt.

The only power a god can teach is the power of doing without happiness.

Very nice sort of place, Oxford, I should think, for people that like that sort of place.

Let wife and child perish, and lay bricks for your last crust, rather than part with an iota of your [copy]rights.

Our political experiment of democracy, the last refuge of cheap misgovernment.

Remember always that the least plain sister is the family beauty.

The problem with the press is that they can't tell the difference between a bicycle crash and the end of civilization.

Medical science is as yet very imperfectly differentiated from common cure-mongering witchcraft

Assassination on the scaffold is the worst form of assassination.

Stop being Jews and start being human beings.

The philosopher is Nature's pilot.

First really like is just a little bit foolishness as well as a lot of curiosity. No actually self-respecting girl would reap the benefits of it.

Make me a beautiful word for doing things tomorrow; for that surely is a great and blessed invention.

My heart, my heart, be whole and free: Love is thine only enemy.

You may well ask me why...I took the time to write [books]. I can only reply that I do not know. There was no why about it. I had to: that was all.

I find that socialism is often misunderstood by its least intelligent supporters and opponents to mean simply unrestrained indulgence of our natural propensity to heave bricks at respectable persons.

The pianoforte is the most important of all musical instruments; its invention was to music what the invention of printing was to poetry.

Absolute honesty is as absurd an abstraction as an absolute temperature or an absolute value.

Effectiveness of assertion is the alpha and omega of style.

Has fear ever held a man back from anything he really wanted?

The greatest evils and the worst of crimes is poverty; our first duty, a duty to which every other consideration should be sacrificed, is not to be poor.

I aint such a mug as to put up my children to all I know myself.

Conceive. That is the word that means both the beginning in imagination and the end in creation.

A man's behaviour may be quite harmless and even beneficial, when he ismorally behaving like a scoundrel. And he may do great harm when he is morally acting on the highest principles.

The public want actresses, because they think all actresses bad. They don't want music or poetry because they know that both are good. So actors and actresses thrive and poets and composers starve.

Vitality is a woman is a blind fury of creation.

Somemenare bornkings; and someare bornstatesmen. The two are seldom the same.

No elaboration of physical or moral accomplishment can atone for the sin of parasitism.

Your father is a fool skin deep; but you are a fool to your very marrow.

As 99 per cent of English authors and 100 per cent of American ones [authors] are just such imbeciles, managers and publishers make a practice of asking for every right the author possesses.

Stimulate the phagocytes.

HIGGINS. Have you no morals, man? DOOLITTLE [unabashed] Cant afford them, Governor. Neither could you if you was as poor as me.

Every step of progress means a duty repudiated, and a scripture torn up.

The world was to Shakespeare a great stage of fools on which he was utterly bewildered. His pregnant observations of life are not coordinated into any philosophy.

Of the two lots, the woman's lot of perpetual motherhood, and the man's of perpetual babyhood, I prefer the man's.

Why not give Christianity a trial?

O Lord! I don't know which is the worst of the country, the walking or the sitting at home with nothing to do.

Whenever I see the word Operation, especially Trifling Operation, I at once write off the patient as dead.

You're only a beginner; and what you think is love, and interest, and all that, is not real love at all: three quarters of it is only unsatisfied curiosity.

Life's no brief candle-it's a splendid torch!

It is well to be off with the old woman before you're on with the new.

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.

Oh, the frontier of hell and heaven is only the difference between two ways of looking at things.

I love little children too but I don't cut off their heads and stick them in vases.

It is the inefficiency and sham of ... our schools ... that save us from being dashed on the rocks of false doctrine instead of drifting down the midstream of mere ignorance.

Sister, you're trying to keep me alive as an old curiosity, but I'm done, I'm finished, I'm going to die.

Female murderers get sheaves of offers of marriage.

We must all share in the evils of the world or move to another planet.