Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde (1854 – 1900) was an Irish writer and poet. Many of his plays, including, The Importance of Being Earnest, Lady Windermere’s Fan are still being performed today.
Oscar Wilde visited 150 cities in America during his ‘talking tour’ of 1882. At Hudson River Dock, he supposedly said his famous line; ‘I have nothing to declare except my genius.’
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America is not a country, it is a world.
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America had often been discovered before Columbus, but it had always been hushed up.
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Walt Whitman and Emerson are the poets who have given the world more than anyone else. Perhaps Whitman is not so widely read in England, but England never appreciates a poet until he is dead.
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In America the young are always ready to give to those who are older than themselves the full benefits of their inexperience.
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When good Americans die, they go to Paris.
Where do bad Americans go?
They stay in America.
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America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between.
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Democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people.
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In one dancing saloon, I saw the only rational method of art criticism I have ever come across. Over the piano was printed a notice:
‘Please do not shoot the pianist. He is doing his best.’
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The English country gentleman galloping after a fox – the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable.
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If one could only teach the English how to talk, and the Irish how to listen, society here would be quite civilised.
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We really have everything in common with America nowadays except, of course, language.
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To many, no doubt, he will seem blatant and bumptious, but we prefer to regard him as being simply British.
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The youth of America is their oldest tradition. It has been going on now for three hundred years.
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America has never quite forgiven Europe for having been discovered somewhat earlier in history than itself.
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Perhaps, after all, America never has been discovered. I myself would say that it had merely been detected.
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The first thing that struck me on landing in America was that if the Americans are not the most well-dressed people in the world, they are the most comfortably dressed.
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Oscar Wilde quotes on life and death
Oscar Wilde quotes on men and women