Quoted in Beatrice Hatch, "Lewis Carroll", Strand Magazine (April 1898), p. 422
“I must decline your offer with thanks, for the child might have my beauty and your brains.”
Anecdote presented in "Isadore Duncan : Dancer as Plaything of Fate" in A Century of Sundays : 100 years of Breaking News in the Sunday Papers (2006), by Nadine Dreyer, p. 65 http://books.google.com/books?id=5rFGX4z8-S8C&pg=PA65&dq=%22Love+is+an+illusion;+it+is+the+world's+greatest+mistake%22&hl=en&sa=X&ei=NPAkT7mJDJKy0AH5vcXkCA&ved=0CDIQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=%22Love%20is%20an%20illusion%3B%20it%20is%20the%20world's%20greatest%20mistake%22&f=false; the anecdote provided here does not cite earlier sources, and though widely attributed to an exchange between Duncan and Shaw, the earliest form of it yet located is in 10,000 Jokes, Toasts & Stories (1939) by Lewis & Faye Copeland, which simply has an unidentified woman offering to have a child with Shaw, saying "think of the child with your brains and my beauty" and him replying "But what if he were to have your brains and my beauty?"
Disputed
Context: [Isadora Duncan] wrote to George Bernard Shaw: "Will you be the father of my next child? A combination of my beauty and your brains would startle the world," but he replied: "I must decline your offer with thanks, for the child might have my beauty and your brains."
“There are none to decline your nectared wine,
But alone you must drink life's gall.”
Solitude
Poetry quotes
Context: Rejoice, and men will seek you;
Grieve, and they turn and go.
They want full measure of all your pleasure,
But they do not need your woe.
Be glad, and your friends are many;
Be sad, and you lose them all.
There are none to decline your nectared wine,
But alone you must drink life's gall.
Life of Agesilaus II
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)
“The American standard of living must decline.”
As Chairman of the Federal Reserve under Carter and Reagan, October 1979. archive.is https://archive.is/lLeUg, New York Times, David McNally, "Global Slump: The Economics and Politics of Crisis and Resistance",
Source: https://books.google.com/books?id=ZRf9BgAAQBAJ&pg=PA25&lpg=PA25&dq=Paul+Volcker,+%E2%80%9CThe+American+standard+of+living+must+decline,%E2%80%9D books.google.com
“There must be engagement: there must be protest.”
Interlude, p. 77
Towards a Canada of Light (2006)
Source: The Naked Civil Servant (1968), Ch. 12
And if David asks why I decline, I explain that it is because I have no desire to meet the woman.
"Come this time, father," he urged lately, "for it is her birthday, and she is twenty-six," which is so great an age to David, that I think he fears she cannot last much longer.
Source: The Little White Bird (1902), Ch. 1
“I believe, and always have, that America must engage — not retreat — in the world.”
Transcript: Hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee on the Nomination of Chuck Hagel to be Secretary of Defense http://www.justforeignpolicy.org/node/1368, submitted by Robert Naiman on February 1, 2013 at Justforeignpolicy.org, accessed February 10, 2013.
2013
Letter declining the 1926 Pulitzer Prize for Arrowsmith
