Saturday, April 30, 2011

Last Word on Royal Wedding and War





A nice illustration by Keith Tucker of WHATNOWTOONS.COM on recent events.



Well, it has been awhile, so let's catch up.

I suppose I should say something about the royal Wedding:  It's over.  There.  Now she can stop taking birth-control pills and look forward to a future of lactation.

Had it not been for NATO and the UN, the war in Libya would be over and with less deaths.  It seems clear that more civilians have been killed by NATO bombing missions (called sorties because French sounds more polite) and "friendly fire" than by any of Kaddafi's forces.  The best descriptions I have heard about the "rebels" is that "they have all the discipline of an LA street gang," and "I wouldn't trust them to take a local Walmart."  The war seems to be pretty much stalled at Misurata.

Libya routed some "revels" to escape over the Tunisian border, at which point our began to call them civilian Tunisians.  Tunisia objected and told them to go home, but when they try to, they get killed as they still want to "rebel".  Oh, yes, I almost forgot -- they are being called "Pro-Democracy" forces and this naturally means that the legally constituted army of an independent and sovereign nation are "Anti-Democracy" forces, or "P" and "A", respectively, or, even better, the A&P forces collectively.

It is nearly May, and Gaddafi is still in power.  He gave a speech on television just recently, but no one knows how it ended as NATO bombed the station or broadcast studios.  Of course, Gaddafi was not there to be bombed.  He knows us better than that.

Hamas and Fatah of the Palestinian state have unified and given themselves a new name (I missed it).  They have been recognized as a sovereign nation by many countries and most countries in the world want them to become a member of the United Nations.  This will be proposed in September.  All that is needed now is for the Security Council to recommend they become a member and for the General Assembly to approve.  Then, peace can be achieved with security for all.  Do you see any impediments to this great solution?  I know the vote will be positive in the General Assembly since it represents most of the world.

Syria is busy settling itself down.  Of course, the A&P is involved there as well, the P including the Moslem Brotherhood, but Assad's father only had to kill about 20,000 of them to ensure peace for all this time.  So, things are looking good there as well.

In Yemen, there is a guy named Saleh who has run the country for decades and promises to step down, right away.  Or as soon as it makes sense to him.  The A&P is involved there as well.  We bomb his rural areas to protect us from terrorists and he takes credit for it, so you can estimate when he will "step down".

In Bahrain, the population is 90% Shia and 10% Sunni.  Therefore, the country is ruled by the Sunni's because our 5th fleet is based there and protects us from the evil Iran.  We know it is evil because it is Shia. 

Places in Morocco are being bombed, but we are not going to talk about that or Algeria because there was a Royal Wedding.   (Well, it's as good a reason as you heard anywhere else, isn't it?)

Oh yes, and Obama has released his long form birth certificate so we know he was born in the United States.  They only question now is why. 

Now, we want to see his Grades.  Actually, I'd like to see Trumps SAT scores, if he has an SA at all.  Or perhaps he has a single-digit ACT score?

Well, no need to get upset.  After all, there was a Royal Wedding. 




Sunday, April 24, 2011

A brief word from Mark Twain

Or perhaps not so brief.  Twain never stopped having his fun with the German language, and while doing it, never being wrong.  It simply takes a different way of thinking to learn German or to think in it and Twain never mastered that part.  Here, however, is a brief comment that I saw for the first time today:

A NEW GERMAN WORD

          To aid a local charity Mr. Clemens appeared before a
          fashionable audience in Vienna, March 10, 1899, reading his
          sketch "The Lucerne Girl," and describing how he had been
          interviewed and ridiculed.  He said in part:

I have not sufficiently mastered German, to allow my using it with
impunity. My collection of fourteen-syllable German words is still
incomplete. But I have just added to that collection a jewel--a
veritable jewel. I found it in a telegram from Linz, and it contains
ninety-five letters:


Personaleinkommensteuerschatzungskommissionsmitgliedsreisekostenrechnungs
erganzungsrevisionsfund

If I could get a similar word engraved upon my tombstone I should sleep
beneath it in peace.


Friday, April 22, 2011

Beyond Good and Evil -- More Aphorisms

It seems that the aphorisms have proved too much of a challenge to many visitors, but I don't care.  Here are some more, this time from one who can easily be considered the most influential writer for the 20th century.  Freud, Sartre, and many others are unthinkable, or would be quite different without him.  He is still controversial today, but that is to his credit.  He was not correctly understood in the English only speaking world, or to anyone who did not read German, until the work of Walter Kaufmann who, quite reluctantly as he shared many of the misconceptions about him, translated him into English in the 1950s.

Here is a selection from Beyond Good and Evil:

63. He who is a thorough teacher takes things seriously--and even

himself--only in relation to his pupils.



64. "Knowledge for its own sake"--that is the last snare laid by

morality: we are thereby completely entangled in morals once more.



65. The charm of knowledge would be small, were it not so much shame has

to be overcome on the way to it.



65A. We are most dishonourable towards our God: he is not PERMITTED to

sin.



66. The tendency of a person to allow himself to be degraded, robbed,

deceived, and exploited might be the diffidence of a God among men.



67. Love to one only is a barbarity, for it is exercised at the expense

of all others. Love to God also!



68. "I did that," says my memory. "I could not have done that," says my

pride, and remains inexorable. Eventually--the memory yields.



69. One has regarded life carelessly, if one has failed to see the hand

that--kills with leniency.



70. If a man has character, he has also his typical experience, which

always recurs.



71. THE SAGE AS ASTRONOMER.--So long as thou feelest the stars as an

"above thee," thou lackest the eye of the discerning one.



72. It is not the strength, but the duration of great sentiments that

makes great men.



73. He who attains his ideal, precisely thereby surpasses it.



73A. Many a peacock hides his tail from every eye--and calls it his

pride.



74. A man of genius is unbearable, unless he possess at least two things

besides: gratitude and purity.



75. The degree and nature of a man's sensuality extends to the highest

altitudes of his spirit.



76. Under peaceful conditions the militant man attacks himself.



77. With his principles a man seeks either to dominate, or justify,

or honour, or reproach, or conceal his habits: two men with the same

principles probably seek fundamentally different ends therewith.



78. He who despises himself, nevertheless esteems himself thereby, as a

despiser.



79. A soul which knows that it is loved, but does not itself love,

betrays its sediment: its dregs come up.



80. A thing that is explained ceases to concern us--What did the God

mean who gave the advice, "Know thyself!" Did it perhaps imply "Cease to

be concerned about thyself! become objective!"--And Socrates?--And the

"scientific man"?



81. It is terrible to die of thirst at sea. Is it necessary that you

should so salt your truth that it will no longer--quench thirst?



82. "Sympathy for all"--would be harshness and tyranny for THEE, my good

neighbour.



83. INSTINCT--When the house is on fire one forgets even the

dinner--Yes, but one recovers it from among the ashes.



84. Woman learns how to hate in proportion as she--forgets how to charm.



85. The same emotions are in man and woman, but in different TEMPO, on

that account man and woman never cease to misunderstand each other.



86. In the background of all their personal vanity, women themselves

have still their impersonal scorn--for "woman".



87. FETTERED HEART, FREE SPIRIT--When one firmly fetters one's heart

and keeps it prisoner, one can allow one's spirit many liberties: I said

this once before But people do not believe it when I say so, unless they

know it already.



88. One begins to distrust very clever persons when they become

embarrassed.



89. Dreadful experiences raise the question whether he who experiences

them is not something dreadful also.



90. Heavy, melancholy men turn lighter, and come temporarily to their

surface, precisely by that which makes others heavy--by hatred and love.



91. So cold, so icy, that one burns one's finger at the touch of him!

Every hand that lays hold of him shrinks back!--And for that very reason

many think him red-hot.



92. Who has not, at one time or another--sacrificed himself for the sake

of his good name?



93. In affability there is no hatred of men, but precisely on that

account a great deal too much contempt of men.



94. The maturity of man--that means, to have reacquired the seriousness

that one had as a child at play.



95. To be ashamed of one's immorality is a step on the ladder at the end

of which one is ashamed also of one's morality.



96. One should part from life as Ulysses parted from Nausicaa--blessing

it rather than in love with it.



97. What? A great man? I always see merely the play-actor of his own

ideal.



98. When one trains one's conscience, it kisses one while it bites.



99. THE DISAPPOINTED ONE SPEAKS--"I listened for the echo and I heard

only praise."



100. We all feign to ourselves that we are simpler than we are, we thus

relax ourselves away from our fellows.



101. A discerning one might easily regard himself at present as the

animalization of God.



102. Discovering reciprocal love should really disenchant the lover with

regard to the beloved. "What! She is modest enough to love even you? Or

stupid enough? Or--or---"



103. THE DANGER IN HAPPINESS.--"Everything now turns out best for me, I

now love every fate:--who would like to be my fate?"



104. Not their love of humanity, but the impotence of their love,

prevents the Christians of today--burning us.



105. The pia fraus is still more repugnant to the taste (the "piety")

of the free spirit (the "pious man of knowledge") than the impia fraus.

Hence the profound lack of judgment, in comparison with the Church,

characteristic of the type "free spirit"--as ITS non-freedom.



106. By means of music the very passions enjoy themselves.



107. A sign of strong character, when once the resolution has been

taken, to shut the ear even to the best counter-arguments. Occasionally,

therefore, a will to stupidity.



108. There is no such thing as moral phenomena, but only a moral

interpretation of phenomena.



109. The criminal is often enough not equal to his deed: he extenuates

and maligns it.



110. The advocates of a criminal are seldom artists enough to turn the

beautiful terribleness of the deed to the advantage of the doer.



111. Our vanity is most difficult to wound just when our pride has been

wounded.



112. To him who feels himself preordained to contemplation and not to

belief, all believers are too noisy and obtrusive; he guards against

them.



113. "You want to prepossess him in your favour? Then you must be

embarrassed before him."



114. The immense expectation with regard to sexual love, and the coyness

in this expectation, spoils all the perspectives of women at the outset.



115. Where there is neither love nor hatred in the game, woman's play is

mediocre.



116. The great epochs of our life are at the points when we gain courage

to rebaptize our badness as the best in us.



117. The will to overcome an emotion, is ultimately only the will of

another, or of several other, emotions.



118. There is an innocence of admiration: it is possessed by him to whom

it has not yet occurred that he himself may be admired some day.



119. Our loathing of dirt may be so great as to prevent our cleaning

ourselves--"justifying" ourselves.



120. Sensuality often forces the growth of love too much, so that its

root remains weak, and is easily torn up.



121. It is a curious thing that God learned Greek when he wished to turn

author--and that he did not learn it better.



122. To rejoice on account of praise is in many cases merely politeness

of heart--and the very opposite of vanity of spirit.



123. Even concubinage has been corrupted--by marriage.



124. He who exults at the stake, does not triumph over pain, but because

of the fact that he does not feel pain where he expected it. A parable.



125. When we have to change an opinion about any one, we charge heavily

to his account the inconvenience he thereby causes us.



126. A nation is a detour of nature to arrive at six or seven great

men.--Yes, and then to get round them.



127. In the eyes of all true women science is hostile to the sense of

shame. They feel as if one wished to peep under their skin with it--or

worse still! under their dress and finery.



128. The more abstract the truth you wish to teach, the more must you

allure the senses to it.



129. The devil has the most extensive perspectives for God; on that

account he keeps so far away from him:--the devil, in effect, as the

oldest friend of knowledge.



130. What a person IS begins to betray itself when his talent

decreases,--when he ceases to show what he CAN do. Talent is also an

adornment; an adornment is also a concealment.



131. The sexes deceive themselves about each other: the reason is that

in reality they honour and love only themselves (or their own ideal, to

express it more agreeably). Thus man wishes woman to be peaceable: but

in fact woman is ESSENTIALLY unpeaceable, like the cat, however well she

may have assumed the peaceable demeanour.



132. One is punished best for one's virtues.



133. He who cannot find the way to HIS ideal, lives more frivolously and

shamelessly than the man without an ideal.



134. From the senses originate all trustworthiness, all good conscience,

all evidence of truth.



135. Pharisaism is not a deterioration of the good man; a considerable

part of it is rather an essential condition of being good.



136. The one seeks an accoucheur for his thoughts, the other seeks some

one whom he can assist: a good conversation thus originates.



137. In intercourse with scholars and artists one readily makes mistakes

of opposite kinds: in a remarkable scholar one not infrequently finds

a mediocre man; and often, even in a mediocre artist, one finds a very

remarkable man.



138. We do the same when awake as when dreaming: we only invent and

imagine him with whom we have intercourse--and forget it immediately.



139. In revenge and in love woman is more barbarous than man.



140. ADVICE AS A RIDDLE.--"If the band is not to break, bite it

first--secure to make!"



141. The belly is the reason why man does not so readily take himself

for a God.



142. The chastest utterance I ever heard: "Dans le veritable amour c'est

l'ame qui enveloppe le corps."



143. Our vanity would like what we do best to pass precisely for what is

most difficult to us.--Concerning the origin of many systems of morals.



144. When a woman has scholarly inclinations there is generally

something wrong with her sexual nature. Barrenness itself conduces to a

certain virility of taste; man, indeed, if I may say so, is "the barren

animal."



145. Comparing man and woman generally, one may say that woman would

not have the genius for adornment, if she had not the instinct for the

SECONDARY role.



146. He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby

become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will

also gaze into thee.



147. From old Florentine novels--moreover, from life: Buona femmina e

mala femmina vuol bastone.--Sacchetti, Nov. 86.



148. To seduce their neighbour to a favourable opinion, and afterwards

to believe implicitly in this opinion of their neighbour--who can do

this conjuring trick so well as women?



149. That which an age considers evil is usually an unseasonable echo of

what was formerly considered good--the atavism of an old ideal.



150. Around the hero everything becomes a tragedy; around the

demigod everything becomes a satyr-play; and around God everything

becomes--what? perhaps a "world"?



151. It is not enough to possess a talent: one must also have your

permission to possess it;--eh, my friends?



152. "Where there is the tree of knowledge, there is always Paradise":

so say the most ancient and the most modern serpents.



153. What is done out of love always takes place beyond good and evil.



154. Objection, evasion, joyous distrust, and love of irony are signs of

health; everything absolute belongs to pathology.



155. The sense of the tragic increases and declines with sensuousness.



156. Insanity in individuals is something rare--but in groups, parties,

nations, and epochs it is the rule.



157. The thought of suicide is a great consolation: by means of it one

gets successfully through many a bad night.



158. Not only our reason, but also our conscience, truckles to our

strongest impulse--the tyrant in us.



159. One MUST repay good and ill; but why just to the person who did us

good or ill?



160. One no longer loves one's knowledge sufficiently after one has

communicated it.



161. Poets act shamelessly towards their experiences: they exploit them.



162. "Our fellow-creature is not our neighbour, but our neighbour's

neighbour":--so thinks every nation.



163. Love brings to light the noble and hidden qualities of a lover--his

rare and exceptional traits: it is thus liable to be deceptive as to his

normal character.



164. Jesus said to his Jews: "The law was for servants;--love God as I

love him, as his Son! What have we Sons of God to do with morals!"



165. IN SIGHT OF EVERY PARTY.--A shepherd has always need of a

bell-wether--or he has himself to be a wether occasionally.



166. One may indeed lie with the mouth; but with the accompanying

grimace one nevertheless tells the truth.



167. To vigorous men intimacy is a matter of shame--and something

precious.



168. Christianity gave Eros poison to drink; he did not die of it,

certainly, but degenerated to Vice.



169. To talk much about oneself may also be a means of concealing

oneself.



170. In praise there is more obtrusiveness than in blame.



171. Pity has an almost ludicrous effect on a man of knowledge, like

tender hands on a Cyclops.



172. One occasionally embraces some one or other, out of love to mankind

(because one cannot embrace all); but this is what one must never

confess to the individual.



173. One does not hate as long as one disesteems, but only when one

esteems equal or superior.



174. Ye Utilitarians--ye, too, love the UTILE only as a VEHICLE for

your inclinations,--ye, too, really find the noise of its wheels

insupportable!



175. One loves ultimately one's desires, not the thing desired.



176. The vanity of others is only counter to our taste when it is

counter to our vanity.



177. With regard to what "truthfulness" is, perhaps nobody has ever been

sufficiently truthful.



178. One does not believe in the follies of clever men: what a

forfeiture of the rights of man!



179. The consequences of our actions seize us by the forelock, very

indifferent to the fact that we have meanwhile "reformed."



180. There is an innocence in lying which is the sign of good faith in a

cause.



181. It is inhuman to bless when one is being cursed.



182. The familiarity of superiors embitters one, because it may not be

returned.



183. "I am affected, not because you have deceived me, but because I can

no longer believe in you."



184. There is a haughtiness of kindness which has the appearance of

wickedness.



185. "I dislike him."--Why?--"I am not a match for him."--Did any one

ever answer so?




Tuesday, April 19, 2011

Maximx for Revolutionaries -- G. B. Shaw

It is noteworthy that most of these are still valid and apply.  They are still ahead of their time (late 19th and early 20th Century).


Project Gutenberg's Maxims for Revolutionists, by George Bernard Shaw

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at http://www.gutenberg.net/


Title: Maxims for Revolutionists

Author: George Bernard Shaw

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MAXIMS FOR REVOLUTIONISTS ***




Produced by Russell Bell



Maxims for Revolutionists

by

George Bernard Shaw

(1856-1950)



THE GOLDEN RULE

Do not do unto others as you would that they should do unto you.  Their
tastes may not be the same.

Never resist temptation: prove all things: hold fast that which is good.

Do not love your neighbor as yourself.  If you are on good terms with
yourself it is an impertinence: if on bad, an injury.

The golden rule is that there are no golden rules.



IDOLATRY

The art of government is the organization of idolatry.

The bureaucracy consists of functionaries; the aristocracy, of idols;
the democracy, of idolaters.

The populace cannot understand the bureaucracy: it can only worship the
national idols.

The savage bows down to idols of wood and stone: the civilized man to
idols of flesh and blood.

A limited monarchy is a device for combining the inertia of a wooden
idol with the credibility of a flesh and blood one.

When the wooden idol does not answer the peasant's prayer, he beats it:
when the flesh and blood idol does not satisfy the civilized man, he
cuts its head off.

He who slays a king and he who dies for him are alike idolaters.



ROYALTY

Kings are not born: they are made by artificial hallucination.  When the
process is interrupted by adversity at a critical age, as in the case of
Charles II, the subject becomes sane and never completely recovers his
kingliness.

The Court is the servant's hall of the sovereign.

Vulgarity in a king flatters the majority of the nation.

The flunkeyism propagated by the throne is the price we pay for its
political convenience.



DEMOCRACY

If the lesser mind could measure the greater as a foot-rule can measure
a pyramid, there would be finality in universal suffrage.  As it is, the
political problem remains unsolved.

Democracy substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment
by the corrupt few.

Democratic republics can no more dispense with national idols than
monarchies with public functionaries.

Government presents only one problem: the discovery of a trustworthy
anthropometric method.



IMPERIALISM

Excess of insularity makes a Briton an Imperialist.

Excess of local self-assertion makes a colonist an Imperialist.

A colonial Imperialist is one who raises colonial troops, equips a
colonial squadron, claims a Federal Parliament sending its measures to
the Throne instead of to the Colonial Office, and, being finally brought
by this means into insoluble conflict with the insular British
Imperialist, "cuts the painter" and breaks up the Empire.



LIBERTY AND EQUALITY

He who confuses political liberty with freedom and political equality
with similarity has never thought for five minutes about either.

Nothing can be unconditional: consequently nothing can be free.

Liberty means responsibility.  That is why most men dread it.

The duke inquires contemptuously whether his gamekeeper is the equal of
the Astronomer Royal; but he insists that they shall both be hanged
equally if they murder him.

The notion that the colonel need be a better man than the private is as
confused as the notion that the keystone need be stronger than the
coping stone.

Where equality is undisputed, so also is subordination.

Equality is fundamental in every department of social organization.

The relation of superior to inferior excludes good manners.



EDUCATION

When a man teaches something he does not know to somebody else who has
no aptitude for it, and gives him a certificate of proficiency, the
latter has completed the education of a gentleman.

A fool's brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition,
and art into pedantry.  Hence University education.

The best brought-up children are those who have seen their parents as
they are.  Hypocrisy is not the parent's first duty.

The vilest abortionist is he who attempts to mould a child's character.

At the University every great treatise is postponed until its author
attains impartial judgment and perfect knowledge.  If a horse could wait
as long for its shoes and would pay for them in advance, our blacksmiths
would all be college dons.

He who can, does.  He who cannot, teaches.

A learned man is an idler who kills time with study.  Beware of his
false knowledge: it is more dangerous than ignorance.

Activity is the only road to knowledge.

Every fool believes what his teachers tell him, and calls his credulity
science or morality as confidently as his father called it divine
revelation.

No man fully capable of his own language ever masters another.

No man can be a pure specialist without being in the strict sense an
idiot.

Do not give your children moral and religious instruction unless you are
quite sure they will not take it too seriously.  Better be the mother of
Henri Quatre and Nell Gwynne than of Robespierre and Queen Mary Tudor.



MARRIAGE

Marriage is popular because it combines the maximum of temptation with
the maximum of opportunity.

Marriage is the only legal contract which abrogates as between the
parties all the laws that safeguard the particular relation to which it
refers.

The essential function of marriage is the continuance of the race, as
stated in the Book of Common Prayer.

The accidental function of marriage is the gratification of the
amoristic sentiment of mankind.

The artificial sterilization of marriage makes it possible for marriage
to fulfill its accidental function whilst neglecting its essential one.

The most revolutionary invention of the XIX century was the artificial
sterilization of marriage.

Any marriage system which condemns a majority of the population to
celibacy will be violently wrecked on the pretext that it outrages
morality.

Polygamy, when tried under modern democratic conditions, as by the
Mormons, is wrecked by the revolt of the mass of inferior men who are
condemned to celibacy by it; for the maternal instinct leads a woman to
prefer a tenth share in a first rate man to the exclusive possession of
a third rate one.  Polyandry has not been tried under these conditions.


The minimum of national celibacy (ascertained by dividing the number of
males in the community by the number of females, and taking the quotient
as the number of wives or husbands permitted to each person) is secured
in England (where the quotient is 1) by the institution of monogamy.

The modern sentimental term for the national minimum of celibacy is
Purity.

Marriage, or any other form of promiscuous amoristic monogamy, is fatal
to large States because it puts its ban on the deliberate breeding of
man as a political animal.



CRIME AND PUNISHMENT

All scoundrelism is summed up in the phrase "Que Messieurs les Assassins
commencent!"

The man who has graduated from the flogging block at Eton to the bench
from which he sentences the garotter to be flogged is the same social
product as the garotter who has been kicked by his father and cuffed by
his mother until he has grown strong enough to throttle and rob the rich
citizen whose money he desires.

Imprisonment is as irrevocable as death.

Criminals do not die by the hands of the law.  They die by the hands of
other men.

The assassin Czolgosz made President McKinley a hero by assassinating
him.  The United States of America made Czolgosz a hero by the same
process.

Assassination on the scaffold is the worst form of assassination,
because there it is invested with the approval of society.

It is the deed that teaches, not the name we give it.  Murder and
capital punishment are not opposites that cancel one another, but
similars that breed their kind.

Crime is only the retail department of what, in wholesale, we call penal
law.

When a man wants to murder a tiger he calls it sport: when the tiger
wants to murder him he calls it ferocity.  The distinction between Crime
and Justice is no greater.

Whilst we have prisons it matters little which of us occupy the cells.

The most anxious man in a prison is the governor.

It is not necessary to replace a guillotined criminal: it is necessary
to replace a guillotined social system.



TITLES

Titles distinguish the mediocre, embarrass the superior, and are
disgraced by the inferior.

Great men refuse titles because they are jealous of them.



HONOR

There are no perfectly honorable men; but every true man has one main
point of honor and a few minor ones.

You cannot believe in honor until you have achieved it.  Better keep
yourself clean and bright: you are the window through which you must see
the world.

Your word can never be as good as your bond, because your memory can
never be as trustworthy as your honor.



PROPERTY

Property, said Proudhon, is theft.  This is the only perfect truism that
has been uttered on the subject.



SERVANTS

When domestic servants are treated as human beings it is not worth while
to keep them.

The relation of master and servant is advantageous only to masters who
do not scruple to abuse their authority, and to servants who do not
scruple to abuse their trust.

The perfect servant, when his master makes humane advances to him, feels
that his existence is threatened, and hastens to change his place.

Masters and servants are both tyrannical; but the masters are the more
dependent of the two.

A man enjoys what he uses, not what his servants use.

Man is the only animal which esteems itself rich in proportion to the
number and voracity of its parasites.

Ladies and gentlemen are permitted to have friends in the kennel, but
not in the kitchen.

Domestic servants, by making spoiled children of their masters, are
forced to intimidate them in order to be able to live with them.

In a slave state, the slaves rule: in Mayfair, the tradesman rules.



HOW TO BEAT CHILDREN

If you strike a child, take care that you strike it in anger, even at
the risk of maiming it for life.  A blow in cold blood neither can nor
should be forgiven.

If you beat children for pleasure, avow your object frankly, and play
the game according to the rules, as a foxhunter does; and you will do
comparatively little harm.  No foxhunter is such a cad as to pretend
that he hunts the fox to teach it not to steal chickens, or that he
suffers more acutely than the fox at the death.  Remember that even in
childbeating there is the sportsman's way and the cad's way.



RELIGION

Beware of the man whose god is in the skies.

What a man believes may be ascertained, not from his creed, but from the
assumptions on which he habitually acts.



VIRTUES AND VICES

No specific virtue or vice in a man implies the existence of any other
specific virtue or vice in him, however closely the imagination may
associate them.

Virtue consists, not in abstaining from vice, but in not desiring it.

Self-denial is not a virtue: it is only the effect of prudence on
rascality.

Obedience simulates subordination as fear of the police simulates
honesty.

Disobedience, the rarest and most courageous of the virtues, is seldom
distinguished from neglect, the laziest and commonest of the vices.

Vice is waste of life.  Poverty, obedience, and celibacy are the
canonical vices.

Economy is the art of making the most of life.

The love of economy is the root of all virtue.



FAIRPLAY

The love of fairplay is a spectator's virtue, not a principal's.



GREATNESS

Greatness is only one of the sensations of littleness.

In heaven an angel is nobody in particular.

Greatness is the secular name for Divinity: both mean simply what lies
beyond us.

If a great man could make us understand him, we should hang him.

We admit that when the divinity we worshipped made itself visible and
comprehensible we crucified it.

To a mathematician the eleventh means only a single unit: to the bushman
who cannot count further than his ten fingers it is an incalculable
myriad.

The difference between the shallowest routineer and the deepest thinker
appears, to the latter, trifling; to the former, infinite.

In a stupid nation the man of genius becomes a god: everybody worships
him and nobody does his will.



BEAUTY AND HAPPINESS, ART AND RICHES

Happiness and Beauty are by-products.

Folly is the direct pursuit of Happiness and Beauty.

Riches and Art are spurious receipts for the production of Happiness and
Beauty.

He who desires a lifetime of happiness with a beautiful woman desires to
enjoy the taste of wine by keeping his mouth always full of it.

The most intolerable pain is produced by prolonging the keenest
pleasure.

The man with toothache thinks everyone happy whose teeth are sound.  The
poverty stricken man makes the same mistake about the rich man.

The more a man possesses over and above what he uses, the more careworn
he becomes.

The tyranny that forbids you to make the road with pick and shovel is
worse than that which prevents you from lolling along it in a carriage
and pair.

In an ugly and unhappy world the richest man can purchase nothing but
ugliness and unhappiness.

In his efforts to escape from ugliness and unhappiness the rich man
intensifies both.  Every new yard of West End creates a new acre of East
End.

The XIX century was the Age of Faith in Fine Art.  The results are
before us.



THE PERFECT GENTLEMAN

The fatal reservation of the gentleman is that he sacrifices everything
to his honor except his gentility.

A gentleman of our days is one who has money enough to do what every
fool would do if he could afford it: that is, consume without producing.

The true diagnostic of modern gentility is parasitism.

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

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.  Such combatants are patriots in the
same sense as two dogs fighting for a bone are lovers of animals.

The North American Indian was a type of the sportsman warrior gentleman.
The Periclean Athenian was a type of the intellectually and artistically
cultivated gentleman.  Both were political failures.  The modern
gentleman, without the hardihood of the one or the culture of the other,
has the appetite of both put together.  He will not succeed where they
failed.

He who believes in education, criminal law, and sport, needs only
property to make him a perfect modern gentleman.



MODERATION

Moderation is never applauded for its own sake.

A moderately honest man with a moderately faithful wife, moderate
drinkers both, in a moderately healthy house: that is the true middle
class unit.



THE UNCONSCIOUS SELF

The unconscious self is the real genius.  Your breathing goes wrong the
moment your conscious self meddles with it.


Except during the nine months before he draws his first breath, no man
manages his affairs as well as a tree does.



REASON

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one
persists in trying to adapt the world to himself.  Therefore all
progress depends on the unreasonable man.

The man who listens to Reason is lost: Reason enslaves all whose minds
are not strong enough to master her.



DECENCY

Decency is Indecency's Conspiracy of Silence.



EXPERIENCE

Men are wise in proportion, not to their experience, but to their
capacity for experience.

If we could learn from mere experience, the stones of London would be
wiser than its wisest men.



TIME'S REVENGES

Those whom we called brutes had their revenge when Darwin shewed us that
they are our cousins.

The thieves had their revenge when Marx convicted the bourgeoisie of
theft.



GOOD INTENTIONS

Hell is paved with good intentions, not with bad ones.

All men mean well.



NATURAL RIGHTS

The Master of Arts, by proving that no man has any natural rights,
compels himself to take his own for granted.

The right to live is abused whenever it is not constantly challenged.



FAUTE DE MIEUX

In my childhood I demurred to the description of a certain young lady as
"the pretty Miss So and So." My aunt rebuked me by saying "Remember
always that the least plain sister is the family beauty."

No age or condition is without its heroes.  The least incapable general
in a nation is its Cæsar, the least imbecile statesman its Solon, the
least confused thinker its Socrates, the least commonplace poet its
Shakespear.



CHARITY

Charity is the most mischievous sort of pruriency.

Those who minister to poverty and disease are accomplices in the two
worst of all the crimes.

He who gives money he has not earned is generous with other people's
labor.

Every genuinely benevolent person loathes almsgiving and mendicity.



FAME

Life levels all men: death reveals the eminent.



DISCIPLINE

Mutiny Acts are needed only by officers who command without authority.
Divine right needs no whip.



WOMEN IN THE HOME

Home is the girl's prison and the woman's workhouse.



CIVILIZATION

Civilization is a disease produced by the practice of building societies
with rotten material.

Those who admire modern civilization usually identify it with the steam
engine and the electric telegraph.

Those who understand the steam engine and the electric telegraph spend
their lives in trying to replace them with something better.

The imagination cannot conceive a viler criminal than he who should
build another London like the present one, nor a greater benefactor than
he who should destroy it.



GAMBLING

The most popular method of distributing wealth is the method of the
roulette table.

The roulette table pays nobody except him that keeps it.  Nevertheless a
passion for gaming is common, though a passion for keeping roulette
tables is unknown.

Gambling promises the poor what Property performs for the rich: that is
why the bishops dare not denounce it fundamentally.



THE SOCIAL QUESTION

Do not waste your time on Social Questions.  What is the matter with the
poor is Poverty: what is the matter with the rich is Uselessness.



STRAY SAYINGS

We are told that when Jehovah created the world he saw that it was good.
What would he say now?

The conversion of a savage to Christianity is the conversion of
Christianity to savagery.

No man dares say so much of what he thinks as to appear to himself an
extremist.

Mens sana in corpore sano is a foolish saying.  The sound body is a
product of the sound mind.

Decadence can find agents only when it wears the mask of progress.

In moments of progress the noble succeed, because things are going their
way: in moments of decadence the base succeed for the same reason: hence
the world is never without the exhilaration of contemporary success.

The reformer for whom the world is not good enough finds himself
shoulder to shoulder with him that is not good enough for the world.

Every man over forty is a scoundrel.

Youth, which is forgiven everything, forgives itself nothing: age, which
forgives itself everything, is forgiven nothing.

When we learn to sing that Britons never will be masters we shall make
an end of slavery.

Do not mistake your objection to defeat for an objection to fighting,
your objection to being a slave for an objection to slavery, your
objection to not being as rich as your neighbor for an objection to
poverty.  The cowardly, the insubordinate, and the envious share your
objections.

Take care to get what you like or you will be forced to like what you
get.  Where there is no ventilation fresh air is declared unwholesome.
Where there is no religion hypocrisy becomes good taste.  Where there is
no knowledge ignorance calls itself science.

If the wicked flourish and the fittest survive, Nature must be the God
of rascals.

If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how
incapable must Man be of learning from experience!

Compassion is the fellow-feeling of the unsound.

Those who understand evil pardon it: those who resent it destroy it.

Acquired notions of propriety are stronger than natural instincts.  It
is easier to recruit for monasteries and convents than to induce an Arab
woman to uncover her mouth in public, or a British officer to walk
through Bond Street in a golfing cap on an afternoon in May.

It is dangerous to be sincere unless you are also stupid.

The Chinese tame fowls by clipping their wings, and women by deforming
their feet.  A petticoat round the ankles serves equally well.

Political Economy and Social Economy are amusing intellectual games; but
Vital Economy is the Philosopher Stone.

When a heretic wishes to avoid martyrdom he speaks of "Orthodoxy, True
and False" and demonstrates that the True is his heresy.

Beware of the man who does not return your blow: he neither forgives you
nor allows you to forgive yourself.

If you injure your neighbor, better not do it by halves.

Sentimentality is the error of supposing that quarter can be given or
taken in moral conflicts.

Two starving men cannot be twice as hungry as one; but two rascals can
be ten times as vicious as one.

Make your cross your crutch; but when you see another man do it, beware
of him.



SELF-SACRIFICE

Self-sacrifice enables us to sacrifice other people without blushing.

If you begin by sacrificing yourself to those you love, you will end by
hating those to whom you have sacrificed yourself.




THE END