"It is hard for the ape to believe he descended from man."

"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."

"Every great wave of popular passion that rolls up on the prairies is dashed to spray when it strikes the hard rocks of Manhattan."

"God is a comedian whose audience is afraid to laugh."

"God is a comedian, playing to an audience too afraid to laugh."

"School days, I believe, are the unhappiest in the whole span of human existence. They are full of dull, unintelligible tasks, new and unpleasant ordinances, brutal violations of common sense and common decency. It doesn't take a reasonably bright boy long to discover that most of what is rammed into him is nonsense, and that no one really cares very much whether he learns it or not."

"We are, in fact, a nation of evangelists; every third American devotes himself to improving and lifting up his fellow-citizens, usually by force; the messianic delusion is our national disease."

"Nevertheless, it is even harder for the average ape to believe that he has descended from man."

"The great artists of the world are never Puritans, and seldom even ordinarily respectable."

"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."

"The cynics are right nine times out of ten."

"Life is a dead-end street."

"Morality and honor are not to be confused. '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."

"Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats."

"Democracy is only a dream: it should be put in the same category as Arcadia, Santa Claus, and Heaven."

"Most people want security in this world, not liberty."

"Indeed it may be said with some confidence that the average man never really thinks from end to end of his life. There are moments when his cogitations are relatively more respectable than usual, but even at their climaxes they never reach anything properly describable as the level of serious thought. The mental activity of such people is only a mouthing of clichés. What they mistake for thought is simply a repetition of what they have heard. My guess is that well over eighty per cent. of the human race goes through life without having a single original thought. That is to say, they never think anything that has not been thought before and by thousands."

"The essence of science is that it is always willing to abandon a given idea for a better one, the essence of theology is that it holds its truths to be eternal and immutable."

"Criticism is prejudice made plausible."

"Immortality is the condition of a dead man who doesn't believe he is dead."

"The common argument that crime is caused by poverty is a kind of slander on the poor."

"Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority. The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong. All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men who have whooped them up and tried to enforce them. 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."

"No married man is genuinely happy if he has to drink worse whisky than he used to drink when he was single."

"On one issue, at least, men and women agree: they both distrust women."

"Platitude: an idea (a) that is admitted to be true by everyone, and (b) that is not true."

"Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage."

"The only cure for contempt is counter-contempt."

"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."

"Hope: A pathological belief in the occurrence of the impossible."

"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."

"We must be willing to pay a price for freedom."

"Adultery is the application of democracy to love."

"Men are the only animals that devote themselves day in and day out to making one another unhappy."

"A celebrity is one who is known to many persons he is glad he doesn't know."

"Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under."

"War will never cease until babies begin to come into the world with larger cerebrums and smaller adrenal glands."

"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."

"A Sunday school is a prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents."

"Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance."

"A good politician is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar."

"All men are frauds. The only difference between them is that some admit it. I myself deny it."

"Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public."

"Penetrating so many secrets we cease to believe in the unknowable. But there it sits nevertheless calmly licking its chops."

"The best client is a scared millionaire."

"In the superman Nietzsche gave the world a conceivable and possible goal for all human effort. But there still remained a problem and it was this: When the superman at last appears on earth, what then? Will there be another super-superman to follow and another super-super-superman after that? In the end, will man become the equal of the creator of the universe, whoever or whatever He may be? Or will a period of decline come after, with return down the long line, through the superman down to man again, and then on to the anthropoid ape, to the lower mammals, to the asexual cell, and, finally, to mere inert matter, gas, ether, and empty space?"

"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."

"Giving every man a vote has no more made men wise and free than Christianity has made them good."

"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."

"Conscience is the inner voice that warns us that someone might be looking."

"A Puritan is a person who lives in the fear that someone somewhere may be having a good time."