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If a nation values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom and the irony of it is that if it is comfort or money that it values more, it will lose that too.

W. Somerset Maugham

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W. Somerset Maugham
Age: 90 †
Born: 1874
Born: January 1
Died: 1965
Died: January 1
Army Scout
Literary Critic
Novelist
Physician Writer
Playwright
Prosaist
Screenwriter
Writer
Paris
France
W. Somerset Maugham
Somerset Maugham
Money
Nation
Anything
Lose
Loses
Libertarianism
Liberty
Patriotic
Politics
Irony
Nations
Libertarian
Values
Economics
Freedom
Comfort

More quotes by W. Somerset Maugham

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Women are strange little beasts,' he said to Dr. Coutras. 'You can treat them like dogs, you can beat them till your arm aches, and still they love you.' He shrugged his shoulders. 'Of course, it is one of the most absurd illusions of Christianity that they have souls.
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The passing moment is all we can be sure of it is only common sense to extract its utmost value from it.
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I'm not only my spirit buy my body, and who can decide how much I, my individual self, am conditioned by the accident of my body? Would Byron have been Byron but for his club foot, or Dostoyevsky Dostoyevsky without his epilepsy?
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And I have the sunset, and the Tuscan wine, and the white teeth of the women in Rome. I am a traveler in Romance.
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How can I be reasonable? To me our love was everything and you were my whole life. It is not very pleasant to realize that to you it was only an episode.
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Beauty is something wonderful and strange that the artist fashions out of the chaos of the world in the torment of his soul.
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There is a sort of man who pays no attention to his good actions, but is tormented by his bad ones. This is the type that most often writes about himself.
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Reserve is an artificial quality that is developed in most of us but as the result of innumerable rebuffs.
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No married man's ever made up his mind until he's heard what his wife has got to say about it.
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It was like making a blunder at a party there was nothing to do about it, it was dreadfully mortifying, but it showed a lack of sense to ascribe too much importance to it.
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I'm only twenty-five. If I've made a mistake I have time to correct it.
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When you are young you take the kindness people show you as your right.
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The crown of literature is poetry.
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No affectation of peculiarity can conceal a commonplace mind.
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For if the proper study of mankind is man, it is evidently more sensible to occupy yourself with the coherent, substantial and significant creatures of fiction than with the irrational and shadowy figures of real life.
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The nature of men and women - their essential nature - is so vile and despicable that if you were to portray a person as he really is, no one would believe you.
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There is nothing so degrading as the constant anxiety about one's means of livelihood.
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There are many foolish people in the world and when a man in a rather high position puts on no frills, slaps them on the back, and tells them he'll do anything in the world for them, they are very likely to think him clever.
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He found that it was easy to make a heroic gesture, but hard to abide by its results.
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There are times when I look over the various parts of my character with perplexity. I recognize that I am made up of several persons and that the person that at the moment has the upper hand will inevitably give place to another. But which is the real one? All of them or none?
W. Somerset Maugham