Any man who, having a child or children he can’t support, proceeds to have another should be sterilized at once.
For the habitual truth-teller and truth-seeker, indeed, the whole world has very little liking. He is always unpopular.
A critic is a man who writes about things he doesn’t like.
At eight or nine, I suppose intelligence is no more than a small spot of light on the floor of a large and murky room.
There is no idea so stupid that you can’t find a professor who will believe it.
The real man lies in the depths of subconscious.
The essence of self-fulfillment and autonomous culture is an unshakable egotism.
Man, at his best, remains a sort of one-lunged animal, never completely rounded and perfect, as a cockroach, say, is perfect.
The instant I reach Heaven, I’m going to speak to God very sharply.
Why writers write I do not know. As well ask why a hen lays an egg or why a cow stands patiently while an underprivileged farmer burglarizes her.
What ails the truth is that it is mainly uncomfortable, and often dull. The human mind seeks something more amusing, and more caressing.
America’s biggest failure is its inability to take comedy seriously.
Skin diseases are something doctors like, the patient neither dies nor gets well.
Justice is what you get when you run out of money.
The verdict of a jury is the a priori opinion of that juror who smokes the worst cigars.
The notion that anything is gained by fixing a language in a groove is cherished only by pedants.
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.