40 quotes
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.
Maxims for Revolutionists (1903)
There are no perfectly honorable men; but every true man has one main point of honor and a few minor ones.
Maxims for Revolutionists (1903)
If you begin by sacrificing yourself to those you love, you will end by hating those to whom you have sacrificed yourself.
Maxims for Revolutionists (1903)
Beware of the man whose god is in the skies.
Maxims for Revolutionists (1903)
Youth, which is forgiven everything, forgives itself nothing: age, which forgives itself everything, is forgiven nothing.
Maxims for Revolutionists (1903)
He who confuses political liberty with freedom and political equality with similarity has never thought for five minutes about either.
Maxims for Revolutionists (1903)
* Love is a simple thing and a deep thing: it is an act of life and not an illusion. Art is an illusion.
Maxims for Revolutionists (1903)
Self-denial is not a virtue: it is only the effect of prudence on rascality.
Maxims for Revolutionists (1903)
No man can be a pure specialist without being in the strict sense an idiot.
Maxims for Revolutionists (1903)
Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.
Maxims for Revolutionists (1903)
In a stupid nation the man of genius becomes a god: everybody worships him and nobody does his will.
Maxims for Revolutionists (1903)
A fool's brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry.
Maxims for Revolutionists (1903)
In an ugly and unhappy world the richest man can purchase nothing but ugliness and unhappiness.
Maxims for Revolutionists (1903)
Disobedience, the rarest and most courageous of the virtues, is seldom distinguished from neglect, the laziest and commonest of the vices.
Maxims for Revolutionists (1903)
The man with a toothache thinks everyone happy whose teeth are sound. The poverty stricken man makes the same mistake about the rich man.
Maxims for Revolutionists (1903)
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.
Maxims for Revolutionists (1903)
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.
Maxims for Revolutionists (1903)
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.
Maxims for Revolutionists (1903)
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.
Maxims for Revolutionists (1903)
The more a man possesses over and above what he uses, the more careworn he becomes.
Maxims for Revolutionists (1903)