No married woman ever trusts her husband absolutely, nor does she ever act as if she did trust him. Her utmost confidence is as wary as an American pickpocket’s confidence that the policeman on the beat will stay bought.
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.
Love is like war: easy to begin but very hard to stop.
Kant was probably the worst writer ever heard of on earth before Karl Marx. Some of his ideas were really quite simple, but he always managed to make them seem unintelligible. I hope he is in Hell.
The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule.
Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.
The demagogue is one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots.
The function of a newspaper in a democracy is to stand as a sort of chronic opposition to the reigning quacks. The minute it begins to out-whoop them it forfeits its character and becomes ridiculous.
It is inaccurate to say that I hate everything. I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty, and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible for public office.
The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed a standard citizenry, to put down dissent and originality.
The ideal Government of all reflective men, from Aristotle onward, is one which lets the individual alone – one which barely escapes being no government at all.
Religion is fundamentally opposed to everything I hold in veneration – courage, clear thinking, honesty, fairness, and, above all, love of the truth.
All men are frauds. The only difference between them is that some admit it. I myself deny it.
Capitalism under democracy has a further advantage: its enemies, even when it is attacked, are scattered and weak, and it is usually easily able to array one half of them against the other half, and thus dispose of both.
It is not materialism that is the chief curse of the world, as pastors teach, but idealism. Men get into trouble by taking their visions and hallucinations too seriously.
Puritanism. The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.
A Sunday school is a prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.
Every man sees in his relatives, and especially in his cousins, a series of grotesque caricatures of himself.
The common argument that crime is caused by poverty is a kind of slander on the poor.
All of the American’s foreign wars have been fought with foes either too weak to resist them or too heavily engaged elsewhere to make more than a half-hearted attempt. The combats with Mexico and Spain were not wars; they were simply lynchings.