But I wonder where we will land if trial judges begin deciding that the fact that a man has committed an atrocious crime is proof sufficient that he is not responsible for his acts.
To argue that the gaps in knowledge which confront the seeker must be filled, not by patient inquiry, but by intuition or revelation, is simply to give ignorance a gratuitous and preposterous dignity.
As if paralyzed by the national fear of ideas, the democratic distrust of whatever strikes beneath the prevailing platitudes, it evades all resolute and honest dealing with what, after all, must be every healthy literature’s elementary materials.
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.
Love begins like a triolet and ends like a college yell.
The dying man doesn’t struggle much and he isn’t much afraid. As his alkalies give out he succumbs to a blest stupidity. His mindfogs. His will power vanishes. He submits decently. He scarcely gives a damn.
No healthy man, in his secret heart, is content with his destiny. He is tortured by dreams and images as a child is tortured by the thought of a state of existence in which it would live in a candy store and have two stomachs.
In any combat between a rogue and a fool the sympathy of mankind is always with the rogue.
There are no institutions in America: there are only fashions.
Nature abhors a moron.
What ass first let loose the doctrine that the suffrage is a high boon and voting a noble privilege?
In every woman’s life there is one real and consuming love. But very few women guess which one it is.
When you sympathize with a married woman you either make two enemies or gain one wife and one friend.
God must love the rich or he wouldn’t divide so much among so few of them.
The average schoolmaster is, and always must be, an ass.
All talk of winning the people by appealing to their intelligence, of conquering them by impeccable syllogism, is so much moonshine.
After all, the world is not our handiwork, and we are not responsible for what goes on in it, save within very narrow limits.
Christian – One who is willing to serve three Gods, but draws the line at one wife.
When a woman says she won’t, it’s a good sign that she will. And when she says she will, it is an even better sign.
The life of man in this world is like the life of a fly in a room filled with 100 boys, each armed with a fly-swatter.