Everything is dangerous, my dear fellow. If it wasn't so, life wouldn't be worth living.
Oscar WildeRead
Rich bachelors should be heavily taxed. It is not fair that some men should be happier than others.
Interpretation
Oscar Wilde suggests that wealth inequality leads to unfair happiness among individuals.
In this quote, Oscar Wilde critiques the social and economic disparities that allow some wealthy individuals, particularly bachelors, to enjoy an elevated level of happiness while others suffer from poverty and hardship. By proposing a heavy tax on rich bachelors, he advocates for a more equitable distribution of wealth that would promote a fairer society, where no individual should feel excessively happy while others are left struggling.
In practice
In a speech advocating for economic reform, one might quote Wilde to highlight the need for fair taxation.
Everything is dangerous, my dear fellow. If it wasn't so, life wouldn't be worth living.
London is too full of fogs and serious people. Whether the fogs produce the serious people, or whether the serious people produce the fogs, I don't know.
When one has never heard a man's name in the course of one's life, it speaks volumes for him; he must be quite respectable.
Men always want to be a woman's first love - women like to be a man's last romance.
A truth ceases to be true when more than one person believes in it.
His morality is all sympathy, just what morality should be
When you know your name, you should hang on to it, for unless it is noted down and remembered, it will die when you do.
Every new development for the last three centuries has brought men closer to a state of affairs in which absolutely nothing would be recognized in the whole world as possessing a claim to obedience except the authority of the State. The majority of people in Europe obey nothing else.
God does not delay to hear our prayers because He has no mind to give; but that, by enlarging our desires, He may give us the more largely.
We need criminals to identify ourselves with, to secretly envy and to stoutly punish. They do for us the forbidden, illegal things we wish to do.
Heathenism is a state of mind. You can take it that I'm referring to one who does not see his world. He has no mental light. He destroys almost unwittingly. He cannot feel any Gods presence in his life. He is the 21st century man.
Creation destroys as it goes, throws down one tree for the rise of another. But ideal mankind would abolish death, multiply itself million upon million, rear up city upon city, save every parasite alive, until the accumulation of mere existence is swollen to a horror.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.