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.
On the one hand, we may tell the truth, regardless of consequences, and on the other hand we may mellow it and sophisticate it to make it humane and tolerable.
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.
Youth, though it may lack knowledge, is certainly not devoid of intelligence; it sees through shams with sharp and terrible eyes.
When a husband’s story is believed, he begins to suspect his wife.
A woman wishes to mother a man simply because she sees into his helplessness, his need of an amiable environment, his touching self-delusion.