Friendship is a common belief in the same fallacies, mountebanks and hobgoblins.
The more I think you over, the more it comes home to me what an unmitigated Middle Victorian ass you are!
Economic independence is the foundation of the only sort of freedom worth a damn.
He who eats alone chokes alone.
Looking for an honest politician is like looking for an ethical burglar.
Nine out of ten Americans are actually monarchists at bottom. The fact is proved by their high suseptibility to political claims by president’s sons and other relatives, usually nonentities.
I know of no existing nation that deserves to live, and I know of very few individuals.
The effect of every sort of New Deal is to increase and prosper the criminal class. It teaches precisely what all professional criminals believe, to wit, that, it is neither virtuous nor necessary to suffer and to do without.
Whenever “A” attempts by law to impose his moral standards upon “B,” “A” is most likely a scoundrel.
War is the only sport which is genuinely amusing. And it is the only sport which has any intelligible use.
During many a single week, I daresay, more money is spent in New York upon useless and evil things than would suffice to run the kingdom of Denmark for a year.
Pedagogues: More than any other class of blind leaders of the blind they are responsible for the degrading standardization which now afflicts the American people.
The notion that artists flourish upon adversity and misunderstanding, that they are able to function to the utmost in an atmosphere of indifference or hostility – this notion is nine-tenths nonsense.
Time is a great legalizer, even in the field of morals.
It is a peculiarity of the American mind that it regards any excursion into the truth as an adventure into cynicism.
There is only one honest impulse at the bottom of Puritanism, and that is the impulse to punish the man with a superior capacity for happiness.
There are no mute, inglorious Miltons, save in the hallucinations of poets. The one sound test of a Milton is that he functions as a Milton.
The physical business of writing is unpleasant to me, but the psychic satisfaction of discharging bad ideas in worse English makes me forget it.
The central difficulty lies in the fact that all of the sciences have made such great progress during the last century that they have got quite beyond the reach of man.
Haste is of the devil. Slowness is of God.