"The most costly of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind."

"Love is the delusion that one woman differs from another."

"It doesn't take a majority to make a rebellion; it takes only a few determined leaders and a sound cause."

"To be in love is merely to be in a state of perceptual anesthesia - to mistake an ordinary young woman for a goddess."

"The chief contribution of Protestantism to human thought is its massive proof that God is a bore."

"Before a man speaks it is always safe to assume that he is a fool. After he speaks, it is seldom necessary to assume it."

"When women kiss it always reminds one of prize fighters shaking hands."

"We are here and it is now. Further than that, all human knowledge is moonshine."

"A professor must have a theory as a dog must have fleas."

"I write in order to attain that feeling of tension relieved and function achieved which a cow enjoys on giving milk."

"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."

"Poetry has done enough when it charms, but prose must also convince."

"If women believed in their husbands they would be a good deal happier and also a good deal more foolish."

"I believe in only one thing: liberty; but I do not believe in liberty enough to want to force it upon anyone."

"A church is a place in which gentlemen who have never been to heaven brag about it to persons who will never get there."

"Men have a much better time of it than women. For one thing, they marry later; for another thing, they die earlier."

"I go on working for the same reason that a hen goes on laying eggs."

"In the duel of sex woman fights from a dreadnought and man from an open raft."

"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."

"In war the heroes always outnumber the soldiers ten to one."

"If a politician found he had cannibals among his constituents, he would promise them missionaries for dinner."

"There are men so philosophical that they can see humor in their own toothaches. But there has never lived a man so philosophical that he could see the toothache in his own humor."

"Democracy is also a form of worship. It is the worship of Jackals by Jackasses."

"Women always excel men in that sort of wisdom which comes from experience. To be a woman is in itself a terrible experience."

"Conscience is a mother-in-law whose visit never ends."

"All government, of course, is against liberty."

"Puritanism. The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy."

"Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable."

"A society made up of individuals who were all capable of original thought would probably be unendurable."

"Communism, like any other revealed religion, is largely made up of prophecies."

"No one in this world has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby."

"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."

"I confess I enjoy democracy immensely. It is incomparably idiotic, and hence incomparably amusing."