The real guarantee of freedom is an equilibrium of social forces in conflict, not the triumph of any one force.
It is the ability to take a joke, not make one, that proves you have a sense of humor.
There is something self-defeating in the too-conscious pursuit of pleasure.
People who demand neutrality in any situation are usually not neutral but in favor of the status quo.
The worst enemy of human hope is not brute facts, but men of brains who will not face them.
Humor is the instinct for taking pain playfully.
Laughter is, after speech, the chief thing that holds society together.
The defining function of the artist is to cherish consciousness.
There is truth in the high opinion that in so far as a man conforms, he ceases to exist.
Laughter puts your brain, your central nervous system and your whole being into a state of free play.
A joke is not a thing but a process, a trick you play on the listener’s mind. You start him off toward a plausible goal, and then by a sudden twist you land him nowhere at all or just where he didn’t expect to go.
A liberal mind is a mind that is able to imagine itself believing anything.
Robert Benchley has a style that is weak and lies down frequently to rest.
I don’t know why it is we are in such a hurry to get up when we fall down. You might think we would lie there and rest for a while.
Emotion is the surest arbiter of a poetic choice, and it is the priest of all supreme unions in the mind.
A poet in history is divine, but a poet in the next room is a joke.
Dogs laugh, but they laugh with their tails. What puts man in a higher state of evolution is that he has got his laugh on the right end.
Classic art was the art of necessity: modern romantic art bears the stamp of caprice and chance.
Patriotism is one of the unalterable facts of man’s nature. It is a virtue if you like it, and a vice if you don’t like it.
I wonder how many revolutions will be required before grown-up people learn not to say to children, ‘I had those same ideas when I was your age.