Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.
Nothing can come out of an artist that is not in the man.
The basic fact about human existence is not that it is a tragedy but that it is a bore.
It takes no more actual sagacity to carry on the everyday hawking and haggling of the world or to ladle out its normal doses of bad medicine and worse law than it takes to operate a taxi cab or fry a pan of fish.
A prohibitionist is the sort of man one wouldn’t care to drink with – even if he drank.
Conscience is a mother-in-law whose visit never ends.
Penetrating so many secrets we cease to believe in the unknowable. But there it sits nevertheless calmly licking its chops.
A cynic is a man who when he smells flowers looks around for a coffin.
What men value in the world is not rights but privileges.
A celebrity is one who is known to many persons he is glad he doesn’t know.
God is a comedian whose audience is afraid to laugh.
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.
Human life is basically a comedy. Even its tragedies often seem comic to the spectator and not infrequently they actually have comic touches to the victim. Happiness probably consists largely in the capacity to detect and relish them.
Men have a much better time of it than women. For one thing they marry later. For another thing they die earlier.
Men have a much better time of it than women. For one thing they marry later. For another thing they die earlier.
Men have a much better time of it than women. For one thing they marry later. For another thing they die earlier.
Men have a much better time of it than women. For one thing they marry later. For another thing they die earlier.
Men have a much better time of it than women. For one thing they marry later. For another thing they die earlier.
Men have a much better time of it than women. For one thing they marry later. For another thing they die earlier.
Men have a much better time of it than women. For one thing they marry later. For another thing they die earlier.
Men have a much better time of it than women. For one thing they marry later. For another thing they die earlier.
Injustice is relatively easy to bear what stings is justice.
A judge is a law student who marks his own examination papers.
‘Tis more blessed to give than to receive for example wedding presents.
Love is the delusion that one woman differs from another.
No matter how happily a woman may be married it always pleases her to discover that there is a nice man who wishes 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.
Men have a much better time of it than women. For one thing they marry later. For another thing they die earlier.
The double standard of morality will survive in this world so long as the woman whose husband has been lured away is favoured with the sympathetic tears of other women and a man whose wife has made off is laughed at by other men.
Morality is the theory that every human act must be either right or wrong and that 99% of them are wrong.
Opera in English is in the main just about as sensible as baseball in Italian.
The first Rotarian was the first man to call John the Baptist Jack.
The one permanent emotion of the inferior man is fear-fear of the unknown the complex the inexplicable. What he wants beyond everything else is safety.
To be in love is merely to be in a state of perpetual anesthesia: To mistake an ordinary young man for a Greek god or an ordinary young woman for a goddess.
Hope: A pathological belief in the occurrence of the impossible.
One may no more live in the world without picking up the moral prejudices of the world than one will be able to go to hell without perspiring.
A celebrity is one who is known to many persons he is glad he doesn’t know.
Puritanism – the haunting fear that someone somewhere may be happy.
Conscience is the inner voice that warns us somebody may be looking.
A Puritan is a person who lives in the fear that someone somewhere may be having a good time.
The only liberty an inferior man really cherishes is the liberty to quit work stretch out in the sun and scratch himself.
The one permanent emotion of the inferior man is fear-fear of the unknown the complex the inexplicable. What he wants beyond everything else is safety.
I hate all sports as rabidly as a person who likes sports hates common sense.
We are here and it is now. Further than that all knowledge is moonshine.
Time is a great legalizer even in the fields of morals.
Time is a great legalizer even in the field of morals.
Men are the only animals that devote themselves day in and day out to making one another unhappy.
Women have simple tastes. They get pleasure out of the conversation of children in arms and men in love.
Unionism seldom if ever uses such powers as it has to ensure better work almost always it devotes a large part of that power to safeguarding bad work.
There are men so philosophical that they can see humor in their own toothaches. But there has never lived a man so philosophical that he could see the toothache in his own humor.
In war the heroes always outnumber the soldiers ten to one.
Love is like war: easy to begin but very hard to stop.
The basic fact about human existence is not that it is a tragedy, but that it is a bore. It is not so much a war as an endless standing in line.
The theory seems to be that as long as a man is a failure he is one of God’s children, but that as soon as he succeeds he is taken over by the Devil.
Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.
I hate all sports as rabidly as a person who likes sports hates common sense.
Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage.
A professor must have a theory as a dog must have fleas.
The opera is to music what a bawdy house is to a cathedral.
Legend: A lie that has attained the dignity of age.
The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.
No one in this world, so far as I know – and I have searched the records for years, and employed agents to help me – has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people.
Communism, like any other revealed religion, is largely made up of prophecies.
Bachelors know more about women than married men if they didn’t they’d be married too.
The only really happy folk are married women and single men.
Women have simple tastes. They get pleasure out of the conversation of children in arms and men in love.
If women believed in their husbands they would be a good deal happier and also a good deal more foolish.
Women always excel men in that sort of wisdom which comes from experience. To be a woman is in itself a terrible experience.
Strike an average between what a woman thinks of her husband a month before she marries him and what she thinks of him a year afterward, and you will have the truth about him.
In this world of sin and sorrow there is always something to be thankful for; as for me, I rejoice that I am not a Republican.
God is a comedian, playing to an audience too afraid to laugh.
The one permanent emotion of the inferior man is fear – fear of the unknown, the complex, the inexplicable. What he wants above everything else is safety.
Puritanism. The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.
It is hard to believe that a man is telling the truth when you know that you would lie if you were in his place.
On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.
Bachelors know more about women than married men if they didn’t they’d be married too.
For it is mutual trust, even more than mutual interest that holds human associations together. Our friends seldom profit us but they make us feel safe. Marriage is a scheme to accomplish exactly that same end.
Whenever a husband and wife begin to discuss their marriage they are giving evidence at a coroner’s inquest.
Men have a much better time of it than women. For one thing, they marry later; for another thing, they die earlier.
Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.
Say what you will about the ten commandments, you must always come back to the pleasant fact that there are only ten of them.
It is even harder for the average ape to believe that he has descended from man.
It is impossible to imagine the universe run by a wise, just and omnipotent God, but it is quite easy to imagine it run by a board of gods.
The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
One of the most mawkish of human delusions is the notion that friendship should be eternal, or, at all events, life-long, and that any act which puts a term to it is somehow discreditable.
The worst government is often the most moral. One composed of cynics is often very tolerant and humane. But when fanatics are on top there is no limit to oppression.
I believe that all government is evil, and that trying to improve it is largely a waste of time.
War will never cease until babies begin to come into the world with larger cerebrums and smaller adrenal glands.
Every man sees in his relatives, and especially in his cousins, a series of grotesque caricatures of himself.
Poetry has done enough when it charms, but prose must also convince.
It is not materialism that is the chief curse of the world, as pastors teach, but idealism. Men get into trouble by taking their visions and hallucinations too seriously.
A society made up of individuals who were all capable of original thought would probably be unendurable.