Well, I tell you, if I have been wrong in my agnosticism, when I die I’ll walk up to God in a manly way and say, Sir, I made an honest mistake.
There’s really no point to voting. If it made any difference, it would probably be illegal.
As the arteries grow hard, the heart grows soft.
The saddest life is that of a political aspirant under democracy. His failure is ignominious and his success is disgraceful.
Penetrating so many secrets, we cease to believe in the unknowable. But there it sits nevertheless, calmly licking its chops.
I know some who are constantly drunk on books as other men are drunk on whiskey.
The great artists of the world are never Puritans, and seldom even ordinarily respectable.
Legend: A lie that has attained the dignity of age.
The best teacher is not the one who knows most but the one who is most capable of reducing knowledge to that simple compound of the obvious and wonderful.
It is the theory of all modern civilized governments that they protect and foster the liberty of the citizen; it is the practice of all of them to limit its exercise, and sometimes very narrowly.
It is the dull man who is always sure, and the sure man who is always dull.
Self-respect: the secure feeling that no one, as yet, is suspicious.
Man is always looking for someone to boast to; woman is always looking for a shoulder to put her head on.
You never push a noun against a verb without trying to blow up something.
I go on working for the same reason that a hen goes on laying eggs.
Most people are unable to write because they are unable to think, and they are unable to think because they congenitally lack the equipment to do so, just as they congenitally lack the equipment to fly over the moon.
No one in this world, so far as I know – and I have searched the records for years, and employed agents to help me – has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people.
Truth would quickly cease to be stranger than fiction, once we got as used to it.
There is in writing the constant joy of sudden discovery, of happy accident.
For it is the natural tendency of the ignorant to believe what is not true. In order to overcome that tendency it is not sufficient to exhibit the true; it is also necessary to expose and denounce the false.