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 Caesar, 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