Voting is simply a way of determining which side is the stronger without putting it to the test of fighting.
What chiefly distinguishes the daily press is its incurable fear of ideas, its constant effort to evade the discussion of fundamentals by translating all issues into a few elemental fears, its incessant reduction of all reflection to mere emotion.
Science, at bottom, is really anti-intellectual. It always distrusts pure reason, and demands the production of objective fact.
A great nation is any mob of people which produces at least one honest man a century.
The truth that survives is simply the lie that is pleasantest to believe.
Whenever A annoys or injures B on the pretense of saving or improving X, A is a scoundrel.
The natural tendency of every government is to grow steadily worse-that is, to grow more satisfactory to those who constitute it and less satisfactory to those who support it.
The true bureaucrat is a man of really remarkable talents. He writes a kind of English that is unknown elsewhere in the world, and an almost infinite capacity for forming complicated and unworkable rules.
Law and its instrument, government, are necessary to the peace and safety of all of us, but all of us, unless we live the lives of mud turtles, frequently find them arrayed against us...
Nothing can come out of an artist that is not in the man.
If x is the population of the United States and y is the degree of imbecility of the average American, then democracy is the theory that x times y is less than y.
What is the function that a clergyman performs in the world? Answer: He gets his living by assuring idiots that he can save them from an imaginary hell.
Metaphysics is almost always an attempt to prove the incredible by an appeal to the unintelligible.
Sometimes the idiots outvote the sensible people.
Let no one mistake it for comedy, farcical though it may be in all its details. It serves notice on the country that Neanderthal man is organizing in these forlorn backwaters of the land, led by a fanatic, rid of sense and devoid of conscience.
Whenever I write anything that sets up controversy its meaning is distorted almost instantly. Even the editorial writers of newspapers seem to be unable to understand the plainest sentence.
Progress: The process whereby the human race has got rid of whiskers, the vermiform appendix, and God.
The genuine music lover may accept the carnal husk of opera to get at the kernel of actual music within, but that is no sign that he approves the carnal husk or enjoys gnawing through it.
No man of honor ever quite lives up to his code, any more than a moral man manages to avoid sin.
It is, indeed, one of the capital tragedies of youth-and youth is the time of real tragedy-that the young are thrown mainly with adults they do not quite respect.