back"Marriage is a wonderful institution, but who would want to live in an institution."
"A man always blames the woman who fools him. In the same way he blames the door he walks into in the dark."
"Democracy is the art of running the circus from the monkey cage."
"A man is called a good fellow for doing things which, if done by a woman, would land her in a lunatic asylum."
"Don't overestimate the decency of the human race."
"It is even harder for the average ape to believe that he has descended from man."
"An absolutely new idea is one of the rarest things known to man."
"...the proof of an idea is not to be sought in the soundness of the man fathering it, but in the soundness of the idea itself. One asks of a pudding, not if the cook who offers it is a good woman, but if the pudding itself is good."
"The basic fact about human existence is not that it is a tragedy, but that it is a bore."
"The capacity of human beings to bore one another seems to be vastly greater than that of any other animals."
"Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit upon his hands, hoist the black flag and begin slitting throats."
"The cosmos is a gigantic flywheel making 10,000 revolutions per minute. Man is a sick fly taking a dizzy ride on it."
"The most common of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind."
"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."
"Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority. .... 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."
"Suicide is belated acquiescence in the opinion of one's wife's relatives."
"Women decide the larger questions of life correctly and quickly, not because they are lucky guessers, not because they practise a magic inherited from savagery, but simply and solely because they have sense. They see at a glance what most men could not see with searchlights and telescopes... They are the supreme realists of the race."
"In brief, she assumed that, being a man, I was vain to the point of imbecility, and this assumption was correct, as it always is."
"To be in love is merely to be in a state of perceptual anesthesia."
"Any man who, having a child or children he can't support, proceeds to have another should be sterilized at once."
"No man can be friendly to another whose personal habits differ materially from his own. Even the trivialities of table manners thus become important. The fact probably explains much of race prejudice, and even more of national prejudice."
"I believe there is a limit beyond which free speech cannot go, but it's a limit that's very seldom mentioned. It's the point where free speech begins to collide with the right to privacy. I don't think there are any other conditions to free speech. I've got a right to say and believe anything I please, but I haven't got a right to press it on anybody else. .... Nobody's got a right to be a nuisance to his neighbors."
"War will never cease until babies begin to come into the world with larger cerebums and smaller adrenal glands."
"Man is never honestly the fatalist, nor even the stoic. He fights his fate, often desperately. He is forever entering bold exceptions to the rulings of the bench of gods. This fighting, no doubt, makes for human progress, for it favors the strong and the brave. It also makes for beauty, for lesser men try to escape from a hopeless and intolerable world by creating a more lovely one of their own."
"Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under."
"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."
"It is inaccurate to say I hate everything. I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty, and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible for public office."
"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."
"The argument that capital punishment degrades the state is moonshine, for if that were true then it would degrade the state to send men to war... The state, in truth, is degraded in its very nature: a few butcheries cannot do it any further damage."
"It is the invariable habit of bureaucracies, at all times and everywhere, to assume...that every citizen is a criminal. Their one apparent purpose, pursued with a relentless and furious diligence, is to convert the assumption into a fact. They hunt endlessly for proofs, and, when proofs are lacking, for mere suspicions. The moment they become aware of a definite citizen, John Doe, seeking what is his right under the law, they begin searching feverishly for an excuse for withholding it from him." "Imagine the Creator as a low comedian, and at once the world becomes explicable."
"Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable."
"Economic independence is the foundation of the only sort of freedom worth a damn."
"Government under democracy is thus government by orgy, almost by orgasm."
"Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing."
"I detest converts almost as much as I do missionaries."
"One seldom discovers a true believer that is worth knowing."
"The chief contribution of Protestantism to human thought is its massive proof that God is a bore."
"The trouble with Communism is the Communists, just as the trouble with Christianity is the Christians."
"We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart."
"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."
"Say what you will about the Ten Commandments, you must always come back to the pleasant fact that there are only ten of them."
"It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics or chemistry."
"It is only the savage, whether of the African bush or of the American gospel tent, who pretends to know the will and intent of God exactly and completely."
"I believe that religion, generally speaking, has been a curse to mankind--that its modest and greatly overestimated services on the ethical side have been more than overcome by the damage it has done to clear and honest thinking."
"An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup."
"The liberation of the human mind has been best furthered by gay fellows who heaved dead cats into sanctuaries and then went roistering down the highways of the world, proving to all men that doubt, after all, was safe--that the god in the sanctuary was a fraud."
"I'm thoroughly convinced that editors don't help authors."
"A poet more than thirty years old is simply an overgrown child."
"No one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public."
"For every problem, there is one solution which is simple, neat and wrong."
"A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin."
"The cynics are right nine times out of ten."
"Conscience is a mother-in-law whose visit never ends."
"The chief value of money lies in the fact that one lives in a world in which it is overestimated."
"After all, all he did was string together a lot of old, well-known quotations." (on Shakespeare)
"People will believe what they want to believe."
"The way for newspapers to meet the competition of radio and television is simply to get out better papers."
"But the whole thing, after all, may be put very simply. I believe it is better to tell the truth than to lie. I believe that it is better to be free than to be a slave. And I believe that it is better to know than to be ignorant."
"Science, at bottom, is really anti-intellectual. It always distrusts pure reason, and demands the production of objective fact."
"...school teachers, taking them by and large, are probably the most ignorant and stupid class of men in the whole group of mental workers."
"..for a professor must have a theory, as a dog must have fleas." "...there is always a well-known solution to every human problem--neat, plausible, and wrong."
"The average man doesn't want to be free. He wants to be safe."
"...history deals mainly with captains and kings, gods and prophets, exploiters and despoilers, not with useful men."
"The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom."
"Truth would quickly cease to become stranger than fiction, once we got as used to it."
"I have little belief in human progress. The human race is incurably idiotic. It will never be happy."
"Immortality is the condition of a dead man who doesn't believe he is dead."
"It is hard to believe that a man is telling the truth when you know that you would lie if you were in his place."
"Philosophy consists very largely of one philosopher arguing that all other philosophers are jackasses. He usually proves it, and I should add that he also usually proves that he is one himself."
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