Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
It is the classic fallacy of our time that a moron run through a university and decorated with a Ph.D. will thereby cease to be a moron.
When I reach the shades at last it will no doubt astonish Satan to discover, on thumbing my dossier, that I was a member of the Y.M.C.A.
I can't imagine a genuinely intelligent boy getting much out of college, even out of a good college, save it be a cynical habit of mind.
What ails the truth is that it is mainly uncomfortable, and often dull. The human mind seeks something more amusing, and more caressing.
A great literature is thus chiefly the product of doubting and inquiring minds in revolt against the immovable certainties of the nation.
The most curious social convention of the great age in which we live is the one to the effect that religious opinions should be respected.
Jury - A group of 12 people, who, having lied to the judge about their health, hearing, and business engagements, have failed to fool him.
The average man does not get pleasure out of an idea because he thinks it is true; he thinks it is true because he gets pleasure out of it.
It is impossible to imagine the universe run by a wise, just and omnipotent God, but it is quite easy to imagine it run by a board of gods.
What fetched me instantly (and thousands of other newcomers with me) was the subtle but unmistakable sense of escape from the United States.
There are no mute, inglorious Miltons, save in the hallucinations of poets. The one sound test of a Milton is that he functions as a Milton.
Man is a beautiful machine that works very badly. He is like a watch of which the most that can be said is that its cosmetic effect is good.
There comes a time in every man's life when he's consumed by the desire to spit on his palms, hoist the black flag and start cutting throats.
What is the professor's function? To pass on to numskulls a body of so-called knowledge that is fragmentary, unimportant, and largely untrue.
If we assume that man actually does resemble God, then we are forced into the impossible theory that God is a coward, an idiot and a bounder.
A woman wishes to mother a man simply because she sees into his helplessness, his need of an amiable environment, his touching self-delusion.
One may no more live in the world without picking up the moral prejudices of the world than one will be able to go to hell without perspiring.
I have often argued that a poet more than thirty years old is simply an overgrown child. I begin to suspect that there may be some truth in it.
Our whole practical government is grounded in mob psychology and the Boobus Americanus will follow any command that promises to make him safer.
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 is only one honest impulse at the bottom of Puritanism, and that is the impulse to punish the man with a superior capacity for happiness.
Sunday is a day given over by Americans to wishing that the themselves were dead and in Heaven, and that their neighbors were dead and in Hell.
The Christian always swears a bloody oath that he will never do it again. The civilized man simply resolves to be a bit more careful next time.
A large part of altruism, even when it is perfectly honest, is grounded upon the fact that it is uncomfortable to have unhappy people about one.
The basic fact about human existence is not that it is a tragedy, but that it is a bore. It is not so much a war as an endless standing in line.
The physical business of writing is unpleasant to me, but the psychic satisfaction of discharging bad ideas in worse English makes me forget it.
A man of active and resilient mind outwears his friendships just as certainly as he outwears his love affairs, his politics and his epistemology.
Why writers write I do not know. As well ask why a hen lays an egg or why a cow stands patiently while an underprivileged farmer burglarizes her.
To the extent that I am genuinely educated, I am suspicious of all the things that the average citizen believes and the average pedagogue teaches.
The only kind of freedom that the mob can imagine is freedom to annoy and oppress its betters, and that is precisely the kind that we mainly have.
If, after I depart this vale, you ever remember me and have thought to please my ghost, forgive some sinner and wink your eye at some homely girl.
The average schoolmaster is and always must be essentially an ass, for how can one imagine an intelligent man engaging in so puerile an avocation.
Have you ever watched a crab on the shore crawling backward in search of the Atlantic Ocean, and missing? That's the way the mind of man operates.
The book of Genesis, a farrago of nonsense so wholly absurd that even Sunday-school scholars have to be threatened with Hell to make them accept it.
If experience teaches us anything at all, it teaches us this: that a good politician, under democracy, is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar.
No reporter of my generation, whatever his genius, ever really rated spats and a walking stick until he had covered both a lynching and a revolution.
One of the things that makes a Negro unpleasant to white folk is the fact that he suffers from their injustice. He is thus a standing rebuke to them.
Religion is fundamentally opposed to everything I hold in veneration - courage, clear thinking, honesty, fairness, and, above all, love of the truth.
The theory seems to be that as long as a man is a failure he is one of God's children, but that as soon as he succeeds he is taken over by the Devil.
On the one side was bigotry, ignorance, hatred, superstition, every sort of blackness that the human mind is capable of. On the other side was sense.
This combat between proletariat and plutocracy is, after all, itself a civil war. Two inferiorities struggle for the privilege of polluting the world.
I never lecture, not because I am shy or a bad speaker, but simply because I detest the sort of people who go to lectures and don't want to meet them.
Unionism, seldom if ever, uses such powers as it has to ensure better work; almost always it devotes a large part of that power to safeguard bad work.
I do not believe in democracy, but I am perfectly willing to admit that it provides the only really amusing form of government ever endured by mankind.
A politician normally prospers under democracy in proportion ... as he excels in the invention of imaginary perils and imaginary defenses against them.
Some boys go to college and eventually succeed in getting out. Others go to college and never succeed in getting out. The latter are called professors.
So few men are really worth knowing, that it seems a shameful waste to let an anthropoid prejudice stand in the way of free association with one who is.
Women in general seem to me to be appreciably more intelligent than men. A great many of them suffer in silence from the imbecilities of their husbands.
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.
The difference between a moral man and a man of honor is that the latter regrets a discreditable act, even when it has worked and he has not been caught.