If what I may believe – about gall-stones, the Constitution, castor oil, or God – is conditioned by law, then I am not a free man.
Absence is the dark-room in which lovers develop negatives.
A woman usually respects her father, but her view of her husband is mingled with contempt, for she is of course privy to the transparent devices by which she snared him.
I believe that no discovery of fact, however trivial, can be wholly useless to the race, and that no trumpeting of falsehood, however virtuous in intent, can be anything but vicious.
We must be prepared to pay a price for freedom, for no price that is ever asked for it is half the cost of doing without it.
I’m ombibulous. I drink every known alcoholic drink and enjoy them all.
Never drink if you’ve got any work to do. Never.
The great difficulty about keeping the Ten Commandments is that no man can keep them and be a gentleman.
Poetry is a comforting piece of fiction set to more or less lascivious music.
No government is ever really in favor of so-called civil rights. It always tries to whittle them down. They are preserved under all governments, insofar as they survive at all, by special classes of fanatics, often highly dubious.
No democratic delusion is more fatuous than that which holds that all men are capable of reason, and hence susceptible to conversion by evidence. If religions depended upon evidence for their prolongation, then all of them would collapse.
Democracy must be a sound scheme at bottom, else it would not survive such cruel strains.
Unsuccessful candidates for the Presidency should be quietly hanged as a matter of public sanitation and decorum.
Philadelphia is the most pecksniffian of American cities, and thus probably leads the world.
Hamlet has been played by 5,000 actors, no wonder he is crazy.
The art of writing, like the art of love, runs all the way from a kind of routine hard to distinguish from piling bricks to a kind of frenzy closely related to delirium tremens.
Women in general seem to me to be appreciably more intelligent than men. A great many of them suffer in silence from the imbecilities of their husbands.
The true aim of medicine is not to make men virtuous; it is to safeguard and rescue them from the consequences of their vices. The physician does not preach repentance; he offers absolution.
The motive of fear is the be-all and end-all of religion.
Those who can’t teach – administrate. Those who can’t administrate – go into politics.