Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
[A formula for answering controversial letters -- without even reading the letters:] Dear Sir (or Madame): You may be right.
The theatre, when all is said and done, is not life in miniature, but life enormously magnified, life hideously exaggerated.
The formula of the argument is simple and familiar: to dispose of a problem all that is necessary is to deny that it exists.
We must be prepared to pay a price for freedom, for no price that is ever asked for it is half the cost of doing without it.
Women always excel men in that sort of wisdom which comes from experience. To be a woman is in itself a terrible experience.
Who ever heard, indeed, of an autobiography that was not (interesting)? I can recall none in all the literature of the world
It is impossible to believe that the same God who permitted His own son to die a bachelor regards celibacy as an actual sin.
The doctrine that the cure for the evils of democracy is more democracy is like saying that the cure of crime is more crime.
If there were only three women left in the world, two of them would immediately convene a court-martial to try the other one.
Man, at his best, remains a sort of one-lunged animal, never completely rounded and perfect, as a cockroach, say, is perfect.
After all, the world is not our handiwork, and we are not responsible for what goes on in it, save within very narrow limits.
The music critic, Huneber, could never quite make up his mind about a new symphony until he had seen the composer's mistress.
Say what you will about the ten commandments, you must always come back to the pleasant fact that there are only ten of them.
The only way to reconcile science and religion is to set up something which is not science and something that is not religion.
Everyman is thoroughly happy twice in his life, just after he has met his first love, and just after he has left his last one.
In this world of sin and sorrow there is always something to be thankful for; as for me, I rejoice that I am not a Republican.
Nine times out of ten, in the arts as in life, there is actually no truth to be discovered; there is only error to be exposed.
The artist is not a reporter, but a Great Teacher. It is not his business to depict the world as it is, but as it ought to be.
The American people, I am convinced, really detest free speech. At the slightest alarm they are ready and eager to put it down.
The fact is that the average man's love of liberty is nine-tenths imaginary, exactly like his love of sense, justice and truth.
The townspeople are morons, yokels, peasants and genus homo boobiensis...surrounded by gaping primates from the upland vallies.
Science, at bottom, is really anti-intellectual. It always distrusts pure reason, and demands the production of objective fact.
Women hate revolutions and revolutionists. They like men who are docile, and well-regarded at the bank, and never late at meals.
All the great villainies of history, from the murder of Abel onward, have been perpetrated by sober men, chiefly by Teetotalers.
The central belief of every moron is that he is the victim of a mysterious conspiracy against his common rights and true deserts.
Thanksgiving Day is a day devoted by persons with inflammatory rheumatism to thanking a loving Father that it is not hydrophobia.
The best years are the forties; after fifty a man begins to deteriorate, but in the forties he is at the maximum of his villainy.
Youth, though it may lack knowledge, is certainly not devoid of intelligence; it sees through shams with sharp and terrible eyes.
The average man never really thinks from end to end of his life. The mental activity of such people is only a mouthing of clichés.
When I hear a man applauded by the mob I always feel a pang of pity for him. All he has to do to be hissed is to live long enough.
Politics, as hopeful men practise it in the world, consists mainly of the delusion that a change in form is a change in substance.
If what I may believe - about gall-stones, the Constitution, castor oil, or God - is conditioned by law, then I am not a free man.
A national political campaign is better than the best circus ever heard of, with a mass baptism and a couple of hangings thrown in.
The pedant and the priest have always been the most expert of logicians - and the most diligent disseminators of nonsense and worse.
A sense of humor always withers in the presence of the messianic delusion, like justice and the truth in front of patriotic passion.
All talk of winning the people by appealing to their intelligence, of conquering them by impeccable syllogism, is so much moonshine.
It seems to me that a great university ought to have room in it for men subscribing to every sort of idea that is currently prevalent
A skeptic as to all ideas, including especially my own, I have never suffered a pang when the ideas of some other imbecile prevailed.
All government, in its essence, is a conspiracy against the superior man: its one permanent object is to oppress him and cripple him.
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.
Not by accident, you may be sure, do the Christian Scriptures make the father of knowledge a serpent - slimy, sneaking and abominable.
No matter how happily a woman may be married, it always pleases her to discover that there is a nice man who wishes that she were not.
Our literature, despite several false starts that promised much, is chiefly remarkable, now as always, for its respectable mediocrity.
The university president who cashiered every professor unwilling to support Woodrow Wilson for the first vacancy in the Trinity. . . .
The truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant, in this field as in all others. His culture is based on 'I am not too sure'.
Congress consists of one-third, more or less, scoundrels; two-thirds, more or less, idiots; and three-thirds, more or less, poltroons.
I am a strict monogamist: it is twenty years since I last went to bed with two women at once, and then I was in my cups and not myself.
What restrains us from killing is partly fear of punishment, partly moral scruple, and partly what may be described as a sense of humor
The penalty for laughing in a courtroom is six months in jail; if it were not for this penalty, the jury would never hear the evidence.
School teachers, taking them by and large, are probably the most ignorant and stupid class of men in the whole group of mental workers.