A living language is like a man suffering incessantly from small hemorrhages, and what it needs above all else is constant transactions of new blood from other tongues. The day the gates go up, that day it begins to die.
The two main ideas that run through all of my writing, whether it be literary criticism or political polemic are these: I am strong in favor of liberty and I hate fraud.
If there were only three women left in the world, two of them would immediately convene a court-martial to try the other one.
Hygiene is the corruption of medicine by morality.
The idea that the sole aim of punishment is to prevent crime is obviously grounded upon the theory that crime can be prevented, which is almost as dubious as the notion that poverty can be prevented.
All I ask is equal freedom. When it is denied, as it always is, I take it anyhow.
Democracy the domination of unreflective and timorous men, moved in vast herds by mob conditions.
Without a doubt there are women who would vote intelligently. There are also men who knit socks beautifully.
They have taken the care and upbringing of children out of the hands of parents, where it belongs, and thrown it upon a gang of irresponsible and unintelligent quacks.
To the man with an ear for verbal delicacies- the man who searches painfully for the perfect word, and puts the way of saying a thing above the thing said – there is in writing the constant joy of sudden discovery, of happy accident.
Suicide is a belated acquiescence in the opinion of one’s wife’s relatives.
Lying is not only excusable; it is not only innocent; it is, above all, necessary and unavoidable. Without the ameliorations that it offers, life would become a mere syllogism and hence too metallic to be borne.
A man who is an agnostic by inheritance, so that he doesn’t remember any time that he wasn’t, has almost no hatred for the religious.
The acting that one sees upon the stage does not show how human beings comport themselves in crises, but how actors think they ought to. It is thus, like poetry and religion, a device for gladdening the heart with what is palpably not true.
Clergyman: A ticket speculator outside the gates of Heaven.
Pastor: One employed by the wicked to prove to them by his example that virtue doesn’t pay.
I detest converts almost as much as I do missionaries.
A fool who, after plain warning, persists in dosing himself with dangerous drugs should be free to do so, for his death is a benefit to the race in general.
The war on privilege will never end. Its next great campaign will be against the privileges of the underprivileged.
I think the Negro people should feel secure enough by now to face a reasonable ridicule without terror. I am unalterably opposed to all efforts to put down free speech, whatever the excuse.