"The trouble with Communism is the Communists, just as the trouble with Christianity is the Christians."

"Strike an average between what a woman thinks of her husband a month before she marries him and what she thinks of him a year afterward, and you will have the truth about him."

"What men value in this world is not rights but privileges."

"I hate all sports as rabidly as a person who likes sports hates common sense."

"The worst government is often the most moral. One composed of cynics is often very tolerant and humane. But when fanatics are on top there is no limit to oppression."

"Equality before the law is probably forever unattainable. It is a noble ideal, but it can never be realized, for what men value in this world is not rights but privileges."

"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 one permanent emotion of the inferior man is fear - fear of the unknown, the complex, the inexplicable. What he wants above everything else is safety."

"Every man sees in his relatives, and especially in his cousins, a series of grotesque caricatures of himself."

"As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. 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."

"Don't overestimate the decency of the human race."

"Opera in English is in the main just about as sensible as baseball in Italian."

"Women have simple tastes. They get pleasure out of the conversation of children in arms and men in love."

"A prohibitionist is the sort of man one couldn't care to drink with, even if he drank."

"The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out... without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane, intolerable."

"Alimony - the ransom that the happy pay to the devil."

"Off goes the head of the king, and tyranny gives way to freedom. The change seems abysmal. Then, bit by bit, the face of freedom hardens, and by and by it is the old face of tyranny. Then another cycle, and another. But under the play of all these opposites there is something fundamental and permanent - the basic delusion that men may be governed and yet be free."

"One of the most mawkish of human delusions is the notion that friendship should be eternal, or, at all events, life-long, and that any act which puts a term to it is somehow discreditable."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"Government today is growing too strong to be safe. There are no longer any citizens in the world there are only subjects. They work day in and day out for their masters they are bound to die for their masters at call. Out of this working and dying they tend to get less and less."

"The plain fact is that education is itself a form of propaganda - a deliberate scheme to outfit the pupil, not with the capacity to weigh ideas, but with a simple appetite for gulping ideas ready-made. The aim is to make 'good' citizens, which is to say, docile and uninquisitive citizens."

"Truth would quickly cease to be stranger than fiction, once we got as used to it."

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

"Yet the same thing happens to the notions of morality. They are devised, at the start, as measures of expediency, and then given divine sanction in order to lend them authority."

"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 the natural tendency of the ignorant to believe what is not true. In order to overcome that tendency it is not sufficient to exhibit the true; it is also necessary to expose and denounce the false. To admit that the false has any standing in court, that it ought to be handled gently because millions of morons cherish it and thousands of quacks make their livings propagating it-to admit this, as the more fatuous of the reconcilers of science and religion inevitably do, is to abandon a just cause to its enemies, cravenly and without excuse."

"The notion that a radical is one who hates his country is naA ve and usually idiotic. He is, more likely, one who likes his country more than the rest of us, and is thus more disturbed than the rest of us when he sees it debauched. He is not a bad citizen turning to crime; he is a good citizen driven to despair."

"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."

"Character in decay is the theme of the great bulk of superior fiction."

"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."

"Self-respect--the secure feeling that no one, as yet, is suspicious."

"The first Rotarian was the first man to call John the Baptist Jack."

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

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

"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."