Thomas Love Peacock

Nothing can be more obvious than that all animals were created solely and exclusively for the use of man.

— Thomas Love Peacock

I never failed to convince an audience that the best thing they could do was to go away.

— Thomas Love Peacock

Marriage may often be a stormy lake, but celibacy is almost always a muddy horse pond.

— Thomas Love Peacock

A book that furnishes no quotations is no book -- it is a plaything.

— Thomas Love Peacock

The waste of plenty is the resource of scarcity.

— Thomas Love Peacock

What is marriage, but the most sordid of bargains, the most cold and slavish of all the forms of commerce?

— Thomas Love Peacock

Marriage is . . . a lottery, and the less choice and selection a man bestows on his ticket the better; for if he has incurred considerable pains and expense to obtain a lucky number, and his lucky number proves a blank, he experiences not a simple, but a complicated disappointment; the loss of labour and money being superadded to the disappointment of drawing a blank, which, constituting simply and entirely the grievance of him who has chosen his ticket at random, is, from its simplicity, the more endurable.

— Thomas Love Peacock