“A church is a place in which gentlemen who have never been to heaven brag about it to persons who will never get there.”
“Men become civilized, not in proportion to their willingness to believe, but in proportion to their readiness to doubt.”
“An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it is also more nourishing.”
“The most valuable of all human possessions, next to a superior and disdainful air, is the reputation of being well-to-do.”
“The objection of the scandalmonger is not that she tells of racy doings, but that she pretends to be indignant about them.”
“Love is an emotion that is based on an opinion of women that is impossible for those who have had any experience with them.”
“It is impossible to believe that the same God who permitted His own son to die a bachelor regards celibacy as an actual sin.”
“Say what you will about the Ten Commandments, you must always come back to the pleasant fact that there are only ten of them.”
“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.”
“The penalty for laughing in a courtroom is six months in jail; if it were not for this penalty, the jury would never hear the evidence.”
“The average man does not get pleasure out of an idea because he thinks it is true; he thinks it is true because he gets pleasure out of it.”
“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.”
“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 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.”
“Have you ever watched a crab on the shore crawling backward in search of the Atlantic Ocean, and missing? That's the way the mind of man operates.”
“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 safeguard bad work.”
“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.”
“It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics and chemistry.”
“The fact that I have no remedy for all the sorrows of the world is no reason for my accepting yours. It simply supports the strong probability that yours is a fake.”
“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.”
“The movies today are too rich to have any room for genuine artists. They produce a few passable craftsmen, but no artists. Can you imagine a Beethoven making $100, 000 a year?”
“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.”
“Philosophy consists very largely of one philosopher arguing that all others are jackasses. He usually proves it, and I should add that he also usually proves that he is one himself.”
“Government is actually the worst failure of civilized man. There has never been a really good one, and even those that are most tolerable are arbitrary, cruel, grasping and unintelligent.”
“It is impossible to think of a man of any actual force and originality, universally recognized as having those qualities, who spent his whole life appraising and describing the work of other men.”
“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.”
“The truth is that the average schoolmaster, on all the lower levels, is and always must be essentially and next door to an idiot, for how can one imagine an intelligent man engaging in so puerile an avocation?”
“Lying is not only excusable; it is not only innocent; it is, above all, necessary and unavoidable. Without the ameliorations that it offers, life would become a mere syllogism and hence too metallic to be borne.”
“There is nothing worse than an idle hour, with no occupation offering. People who have many such hours are simply animals waiting docilely for death. We all come to that state soon or late. It is the curse of senility.”
“The public, with its mob yearning to be instructed, edified and pulled by the nose, demands certainties; it must be told definitely and a bit raucously that this is true and that is false. But there are no certainties.”