If I ever mary, it will be on a suddn impulse – as aman shoots himself.
The common notion that free speech prevails in the United States always makes me laugh.
The only way for a reporter to look at a politician is down.
A man who knows a subject thoroughly, a man so soaked in it that he eats it, sleeps it and dreams it- this man can always teach it with success, no matter how little he knows of technical pedagogy.
When I hear a man applauded by the mob I always feel a pang of pity for him. All he has to do to be hissed is to live long enough.
I never agree with Communists or any other kind of kept men.
Never let your inferiors do you a favor – it will be extremely costly.
The smallest atom of truth represents some man’s bitter toil and agony; for every ponderable chunk of it there is a brave truth-seeker’s grave upon some lonely ash-dump and a soul roasting in hell.
The chief difference between free capitalism and State socialism seems to be this: that under the former a man pursues his own advantage openly, frankly and honestly, whereas under the latter he does so hypocritically and under false pretenses.
A skeptic as to all ideas, including especially my own, I have never suffered a pang when the ideas of some other imbecile prevailed.
It costs more to maintain ten vices than one virtue.
The real charm of the United States is that it is the only comic country ever heard of.
No reporter of my generation, whatever his genius, ever really rated spats and a walking stick until he had covered both a lynching and a revolution.
After all, why be good? How many will actually believe it of us?
Every reader of the Dreiser novels must cherish astounding specimens – of awkward, platitudinous marginalia, of whole scenes spoiled by bad writing, of phrases as brackish as so many lumps of sodium hyposulphite.
Popularity – The capacity for listening sympathetically when men boast of their wives and women complain of their husbands.
The average man gets his living by such depressing devices that boredom becomes a sort of natural state to him.
The only way to reconcile science and religion is to set up something which is not science and something that is not religion.
Evangelical Christianity, as everyone knows, is founded upon hate, as the Christianity of Christ was founded upon love.
One horse-laugh is worth ten thousand syllogisms. It is not only more effective; it is also vastly more intelligent.