Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.
You can’t do anything about the length of your life, but you can do something about its width and depth.
The older I grow, the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.
An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it makes a better soup.
We must respect the other fellow’s religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart.
Explanations exist; they have existed for all time; there is always a well-known solution to every human problem—neat, plausible, and wrong.
Truth would quickly cease to be stranger than fiction, once we got as used to it.
Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.
A philosopher is a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat that isn’t there. A theologian is the man who finds it.
If we assume that man actually does resemble God, then we are forced into the impossible theory that God is a coward, an idiot and a bounder.
We are here and it is now. Further than that, all human knowledge is moonshine.
Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.
No matter how happily a woman may be married, it always pleases her to discover that there is a nice man who wishes that she were not.
If, after I depart this vale, you ever remember me and have thought to please my ghost, forgive some sinner and wink your eye at some homely girl.
You never push a noun against a verb without trying to blow up something.
There is in writing the constant joy of sudden discovery, of happy accident.
The trouble with Communism is the Communists, just as the trouble with Christianity is the Christians.
Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing.
A judge is a law student who marks his own examination papers.
Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.
A good politician is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar.
Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods.
The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.
One cannot enter a State legislature or a prison for felons without becoming, in some measure, a dubious character.
On one issue, at least, men and women agree: they both distrust women.
Giving every man a vote has no more made men wise and free than Christianity has made them good.
The great artists of the world are never Puritans, and seldom even ordinarily respectable.
Marriage is a wonderful institution, but who would want to live in an institution?
When somebody says it’s not about the money, it’s about the money.
After all, all he did was string together a lot of old, well-known quotations.
There is reinforcement in such familiar back-formations as Chinee from Chinese, Portugee from Portuguese.
Morality is doing what is right regardless of what you are told. Obedience is doing what is told regardless of what is right.
Yet the same thing happens to the notions of morality. They are devised, at the start, as measures of expediency, and then given divine sanction in order to lend them authority.
The kind of man who wants the government to adopt and enforce his ideas is always the kind of man whose ideas are idiotic.
Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.
I do not believe in democracy, but I am perfectly willing to admit that it provides the only really amusing form of government ever endured by mankind.
The demagogue is one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots.
I believe that it is better to tell the truth than a lie. I believe it is better to be free than to be a slave. And I believe it is better to know than to be ignorant.
But the whole thing, after all, may be put very simply. I believe that it is better to tell the truth than to lie. I believe that it is better to be free than to be a slave. And I believe that it is better to know than be ignorant.
Nevertheless, it is even harder for the average ape to believe that he has descended from man.
The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it. Power is what all messiahs really seek: not the chance to serve. This is true even of the pious brethren who carry the gospel to foreign parts.
A home is not a mere transient shelter: its essence lies in the personalities of the people who live in it.
There are two kinds of Europeans: The smart ones, and those who stayed behind.
We are, in fact, a nation of evangelists; every third American devotes himself to improving and lifting up his fellow-citizens, usually by force; the messianic delusion is our national disease.
Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.
No one in this world, so far as I know—and I have searched the record for years, and employed agents to help me—has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people.
Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule—and both commonly succeed, and are right.
Nietzsche, an infinitely harder and more courageous intellect, was incapable of any such confusion of ideas; he seldom allowed sentimentality to turn him from the glaring fact.
Conscience is the inner voice that warns us somebody may be looking.
Equality before the law is probably forever unattainable. It is a noble ideal, but it can never be realized, for what men value in this world is not rights but privileges.
He sees daily evidence that many things held to be true by nine-tenths of all men are, in reality, false, and he is thereby apt to acquire a doubt of everything, including his own beliefs.
Morality and honor are not to be confused. “The difference between a moral man and a man of honor is that the latter regrets a discreditable act, even when it has worked and he has not been caught.
American journalism (like the journalism of any other country) is predominantly paltry and worthless. Its pretensions are enormous, but its achievements are insignificant.
A poet more than thirty years old is simply an overgrown child.
Immortality is the condition of a dead man who doesn’t believe he is dead.
Every great wave of popular passion that rolls up on the prairies is dashed to spray when it strikes the hard rocks of Manhattan.
Self-respect–the secure feeling that no one, as yet, is suspicious.