FridayMay 15, 2026
Quotes: 53419 Authors: 9969
All of the great patriots now engaged in edging and squirming their way toward the Presidency of the Republic run true to form. That is to say, they are all extremely wary, and all more or less palpable frauds. What they want, primarily, is the job; the necessary equipment of unescapable issues, immutable principles and soaring ideals can wait until it becomes more certain which way the mob will be whooping.
I dont want any yes-men around me. I want everybody to tell me the truth even if it costs them their jobs.
Conscience is the inner voice that warns us somebody is looking.
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.
Life is a dead-end street.
Giving every man a vote has no more made men wise and free than Christianity has made them good.
Temptation is an irresistible force at work on a moveable body.
How little it takes to make life unbearable: a pebble in the shoe, a cockroach in the spaghetti, a woman's laugh.
Self-repect The secure feeling that no one, as yet, is suspicious.
Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.
Marriage is a wonderful institution, but who would want to live in an institution?
Bachelors know more about women than married men; if they didnt, theyd be married too.
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.
The value the world sets upon motives is often grossly unjust and inaccurate. Consider, for example, two of them: mere insatiable curiosity and the desire to do good. The latter is put high above the former, and yet it is the former that moves one of the most useful men the human race has yet produced: the scientific investigator. What actually urges him on is not some brummagem idea of Service, but a boundless, almost pathological thirst to penetrate the unknown, to uncover the secret, to find out what has not been found out before. His prototype is not the liberator releasing slaves, the good Samaritan lifting up the fallen, but a dog sniffing tremendously at an infinite series of rat-holes.
The chief value of money lies in the fact that one lives in a world in which it is overestimated.
A man is called a good fellow for doing things which, if done by a woman, would land her in a lunatic asylum.
Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.
Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.
The fact is that liberty, in any true sense, is a concept that lies quite beyond the reach of the inferior man's mind. And no wonder, for genuine liberty demands of its votaries a quality he lacks completely, and that is courage. The man who loves it must be willing to fight for it; blood, said Jefferson, is its natural manure. Liberty means self-reliance, it means resolution, it means the capacity for doing without ... the average man doesn't want to be free. He wants to be safe.
We are here and it is now. Further than that all human knowledge is moonshine.
It is common to assume that human progress affects everyone that even the dullest man, in these bright days, knows more than any man of, say, the Eighteenth Century, and is far more civilized. This assumption is quite erroneous.... The great masses of men, even in this inspired republic, are precisely where the mob was at the dawn of history. They are ignorant, they are dishonest, they are cowardly, they are ignoble. They know little if anything that is worth knowing, and there is not the slightest sign of a natural desire among them to increase their knowledge.
The fact that a human brain of high amperage, otherwise highly efficient, may have a hole in it is surely not a secret.
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.
A home is not a mere transient shelter: its essence lies in the personalities of the people who live in it.
Hanging one scoundrel, it appears, does not deter the next. Well, what of it? The first one at least is disposed of.
Democracy the domination of unreflective and timorous men, moved in vast herds by mob conditions.
Democracy is also a form of worship. It is the worship of Jackals by Jackasses.
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.
The capacity of human beings to bore one another seems to be vastly greater than that of any other animal.
It is even harder for the average ape to believe that he has descended from man.
All men are frauds. The only difference between them is that some admit it. I myself deny it.
An idealist is one who, on noticing that roses smell better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup.
To the man with an ear for verbal delicacies- the man who searches painfully for the perfect word, and puts the way of saying a thing above the thing said there is in writing the constant joy of sudden discovery, of happy accident.
The average man gets his living by such depressing devices that boredom becomes a sort of natural state to him.
Women have simple tastes. They can get pleasure out of the conversation of children in arms and men in love.
On one issue at least, men and women agree; they both distrust women.
War will never cease until babies begin to come into the world with larger cerebrums and smaller adrenal glands.
The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule.
Time is the great legalizer, even in the field of morals.
No one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.
The fact that I have no remedy for all the sorrows of the world is no reason for my accepting yours. It simply supports the strong probability that yours is a fake.
We must repsect 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 are smart.
After all, all he did was string together a lot of old, well-known quotations.
Unquestionably, there is progress. The average American now pays out twice as much in taxes as he formerly got in wages.
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.
A politician is an animal which can sit on a fence and yet keep both ears to the ground.
If, after I depart this vale, you ever remember me and have thought to please my ghost, forgive some sinner and wink your eye at some homely girl.
The truth that survives is simply the lie that is pleasantest to believe.
All government, of course, is against liberty.
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.
Any man who afflicts the human race with ideas must be prepared to see them misunderstood.
An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup.
The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.
Conscience is the inner voice that warns us somebody may be looking.
Experience is a poor guide to man, and is seldom followed. What really teaches a man is not experience, but observation.
The world always makes the assumption that the exposure of an error is identical with the discovery of the truth that error and truth are simply opposite. They are nothing of the sort. What the world turns to, when it has been cured of one error, is usually simply another error, and maybe one worse than the first.
Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods.
School days are the unhappiest in the whole span if human existence. They are full of dull, unintelligible tasks, new and unpleasant ordinances, with brutal violations of common sense and common decency.
There is always an easy solution to every human problemneat, plausible and wrong.
Democracy is the art form of running the circus from the monkey cage.
Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.
Do not overestimate the decency of the human race.
Bridges would not be safer if only people who knew the proper definition of a real number were allowed to design 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 and chemistry.
There are some people who read too much: The bibliobibuli. I know some who are constantly drunk on books, as others are drunk on whiskey or religion. They wander through this most diverting and stimulating of worlds in a haze, seeing nothing and hearing nothing.
The great artists of the world are never Puritans, and seldom even ordinarily respectable.
The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.
Without a doubt there are women who would vote intelligently. There are also men who knit socks beautifully.
Women do not like timid men. Cats do not like prudent rats.
If there were only three women left in the world, two of them would immediately convene a court-martial to try the other one.
After all, why be good? How many will actually believe it of us?
A man always blames the woman who fools him. In the same way he blames the door he walks into in the dark.
There are two times in every man's life when he is thoroughly happy; just after he has met his first love and just after he has parted from his last one.
No form of liberty is worth a darn [sic] which doesn't give us the right to do wrong now and then.
Happiness is the china shop; love is the bull.
The Christian always mixes prudence with his devotion. He is willing to serve three gods, but draws the line at one wife.
Honor is simply the morality of superior men.
Women hate revolutions and revolutionists. They like men who are docile, and well-regarded at the bank, and never late at meals.
Poetry is a comforting piece of fiction set to more or less lascivious music.
The essence of a self-reliant and autonomous culture is an unshakable egoism.
Whenever a husband and wife begin to discuss their marriage, they are giving evidence at an inquest.
Wealth - any income that is at least one hundred dollars more a year than the income of one's wife's sister's husband.
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.
The thing constantly overlooked by those hopefuls who talk About abolishing war is that it is by no means an evidence of the decay but rather a proof of health and vigor.
The only real happy folk are married women and single men.
The basic fact about human existence is not that it is A tragedy, but that it is a bore.
Temptation - An irresistible force at work on a moveable Body.
Metaphysics is almost always an attempt to prove the incredible by an appeal to the unintelligible.
Men become civilized, not in proportion to their willingness to believe, but in proportion to their readiness to doubt.
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.
Injustice is relatively easy to bear; what stings is justice.
If a politician found he had cannibals among his constituents, he would promise them missionaries for dinner.
A man may be a fool and not know it, but not if he is married.
A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin.
A celebrity is one who is known to many persons he is glad he doesn't know.
It is a sin to believe evil of others, But it is seldom a mistake.
The real man lies in the depths of the subconscious.
Love is the delusion that one woman differs from another.
Opera in English is, in the main, about as sensible as baseball in Italian.
Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit upon his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.
For centuries, theologians have been explaining the unknowable in terms of the-not-worth-knowing.
Criticism is prejudice made plausible.
The cynics are right nine times out of ten.
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