No professional politician is ever actually in favor of public economy. It is his implacable enemy, and he knows it. All professional politicians are dedicated wholeheartedly to waste and corruption. They are the enemies of every decent man.
If the average man is made in God’s image, then such a man as Beethoven or Aristotle is plainly superior to God.
The most costly of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind.
The chief value of money lies in the fact that one lives in a world in which it is overestimated.
Equality before the law is probably forever unattainable. It is a noble ideal, but it can never be realized, for what men value in this world is not rights but privileges.
The essence of science is that it is always willing to abandon a given idea for a better one; the essence of theology is that it holds its truths to be eternal and immutable.
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.
You come into the world with nothing, and the purpose of your life is to make something out of nothing.
A man loses his sense of direction after four drinks; a woman loses hers after four kisses.
Dachshund: A half-a-dog high and a dog-and-a-half long.
The only kind of freedom that the mob can imagine is freedom to annoy and oppress its betters, and that is precisely the kind that we mainly have.
Any man who afflicts the human race with ideas must be prepared to see them misunderstood.
Misogynist: A man who hates women as much as women hate one another.
Our whole practical government is grounded in mob psychology and the Boobus Americanus will follow any command that promises to make him safer.
No article of faith is proof against the disintegrating effects of increasing information; one might almost describe the acquirement of knowledge as a process of disillusion.
The New Deal began, like the Salvation Army, by promising to save humanity. It ended, again like the Salvation Army, by running flop-houses and disturbing the peace.
Socialist: A man suffering from an overwhelming conviction to believe what is not true.
Capital punishment has probably been responsible for a good deal of human progress. The overwhelming majority of those executed were of the sort whose departures for bliss eternal improved the average intelligence and decency of the race.
If there had been any formidable body of cannibals in the country, Harry Truman would have promised to provide them with free missionaries fattened at the taxpayer’s expense.
Puccini – silver macaroni, exquisitely tangled.