"No matter how long he lives, no man ever becomes as wise as the average woman of forty-eight."

"As the arteries grow hard, the heart grows soft."

"Happiness is the china shop love is the bull."

"On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron."

"One cannot enter a State legislature or a prison for felons without becoming, in some measure, a dubious character."

"Human life is basically a comedy. Even its tragedies often seem comic to the spectator and not infrequently they actually have comic touches to the victim. Happiness probably consists largely in the capacity to detect and relish them."

"There is a saying in Baltimore that crabs may be prepared in fifty ways and that all of them are good."

"New York: A third-rate Babylon."

"Legend: A lie that has attained the dignity of age."

"The opera is to music what a bawdy house is to a cathedral."

"One of the most irrational of all the conventions of modern society is the one to the effect that religious opinions should be respected. [This] convention protects them, and so they proceed with their blather unwhipped and almost unmolested, to the great damage of common sense and common decency. that they should have this immunity is an outrage. There is nothing in religious ideas, as a class, to lift them above other ideas. On the contrary, they are always dubious and often quite silly. Nor is there any visible intellectual dignity in theologians. Few of them know anything that is worth knowing, and not many of them are even honest."

"Bachelors know more about women than married men; if they didn't they'd be married too."

"A philosopher is a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat that isn't there. A theologian is the man who finds it."

"A home is not a mere transient shelter: its essence lies in the personalities of the people who live in it."

"A man may be a fool and not know it, but not if he is married."

"Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule - and both commonly succeed and are right."

"Unquestionably, there is progress. The average American now pays out twice as much in taxes as he formerly got in wages."

"The most erroneous assumption is to the effect that the aim of public education is to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence, and so make them fit to discharge the duties of citizenship in an enlightened and independent manner. Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States, whatever the pretensions of politicians, pedagogues and other such mountebanks, and that is its aim everywhere else."

"He sees daily evidence that many things held to be true by nine-tenths of all men are, in reality, false, and he is thereby apt to acquire a doubt of everything, including his own beliefs."

"Judge: a law student who marks his own examination-papers."

"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."

"Archbishop - A Christian ecclesiastic of a rank superior to that attained by Christ."

"It is inaccurate to say that I hate everything. I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty, and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible for public office."

"Time is a great legalizer even in the field of morals."

"Honor is simply the morality of superior men."

"Life is a constant oscillation between the sharp horns of dilemmas."

"It takes no more actual sagacity to carry on the everyday hawking and haggling of the world or to ladle out its normal doses of bad medicine and worse law than it takes to operate a taxi cab or fry a pan of fish."

"Tis more blessed to give than to receive for example wedding presents."

"Love is an emotion that is based on an opinion of women that is impossible for those who have had any experience with them."

"Say what you will about the ten commandments, you must always come back to the pleasant fact that there are only ten of them."

"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."

"Man is always looking for someone to boast to; woman is always looking for a shoulder to put her head on."

"It is not materialism that is the chief curse of the world, as pastors teach, but idealism. Men get into trouble by taking their visions and hallucinations too seriously."

"For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong."

"Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing."

"Nietzsche, an infinitely harder and more courageous intellect, was incapable of any such confusion of ideas; he seldom allowed sentimentality to turn him from the glaring fact."

"Marriage is a wonderful institution, but who would want to live in an institution?"

"A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin."

"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."

"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."

"I have often misunderstood men grossly, and I have misrepresented them when I understood them, sacrificing sense to make a phrase. Here, of course, is where even the most conscientious critic often goes aground; he is apt to be an artist before he is a scientist, and the impulse to create something passionately is stronger in him than the impulse to state something accurately."

"Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence."

"Husbands never become good; they merely become proficient."

"Civilization, in fact, grows more maudlin and hysterical; especially under democracy it tends to degenerate into a mere combat of crazes; the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary. Wars are no longer waged by the will of superior men, capable of judging dispassionately and intelligently the causes behind them and the effects flowing out of them. The are now begun by first throwing a mob into a panic; they are ended only when it has spent its ferine fury."

"Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods."

"Time stays, we go."

"For it is mutual trust, even more than mutual interest that holds human associations together. Our friends seldom profit us but they make us feel safe. Marriage is a scheme to accomplish exactly that same end."

"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 kind of man who wants the government to adopt and enforce his ideas is always the kind of man whose ideas are idiotic."

"I believe that it is better to tell the truth than a lie. I believe it is better to be free than to be a slave. And I believe it is better to know than to be ignorant."