Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else.

Make all you can, save all you can, give all you can.

Modern war has decimated many a country; but it has always spawned millions of bureaucrats. They fatten on shortages and thrive on trouble. Peace can never offer such opportunities for exercising petty tyrannies, using red tape to regiment the individual and making life generally unpleasant.

Age is not a particularly interesting subject. Anyone can get old. All you have to do is live long enough.

We do what we must, and call it by the best names.

Advertising is the modern substitute for argument; its function is to make the worse appear the better.

Music is essentially useless, as life is.

Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. In the first stage of life the mind is frivolous and easily distracted, it misses progress by failing in consecutiveness and persistence. This is the condition of children and barbarians, in which instinct has learned nothing from experience.

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

Be you in what line of life you may, it will be amongst your misfortunes if you have not time properly to attend to pecuniary [monetary] matters. Want of attention to these matters has impeded the progress of science and of genius itself.