“It is the tame elephants who enjoy capturing the wild ones.”

“Wilde's permanent celebrity belongs to literature, and only his transient notoriety to police news.”

“A gentleman is one who puts more into the world than he takes out.”

“One man that has a mind and knows it can always beat ten men who haven't and don't.”

“I'm glad he's hungry. Not that I want him to suffer, poor chap! But then he'll enjoy eating me much more. There's a cheerful side to everything.”

“Your weak side, my diabolic friend, is that you have always been a gull: you take Man at his own valuation. Nothing would flatter him more than your opinion of him. He loves to think of himself as bold and bad. He is neither one nor the other: he is only a coward. Call him tyrant, murderer, pirate, bully; and he will adore you, and swagger about with the consciousness of having the blood of the old sea kings in his veins. Call him liar and thief; and he will only take an action against you for libel. But call him coward; and he will go mad with rage: he will face death to outface that stinging truth. Man gives every reason for his conduct save one, every excuse for his crimes save one, every plea for his safety save one: and that one is his cowardice. Yet all his civilization is founded on his cowardice, on his abject tameness, which he calls his respectability. There are limits to what a mule or an ass will stand; but Man will suffer himself to be degraded until his vileness becomes so loathsome to his oppressors that they themselves are forced to reform it.”

“I find it easy to forgive the man who invented a devilish instrument like dynamite, but how can one ever forgive the diabolical mind that invented the Nobel Prize in Literature?”