As you can see, he was a complex man. Sort of our Nietzsche.
**************
A church is a place in which gentlemen who have never been to heaven brag about it to persons who will never get there.
A good politician is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar.
A prohibitionist is the sort of man one couldn't care to drink with, even if he drank.
A society made up of individuals who were all capable of original thought would probably be unendurable.
Adultery is the application of democracy to love.
Bachelors know more about women than married men; if they didn't they'd be married too.
Communism, like any other revealed religion, is largely made up of prophecies.
Democracy is also a form of worship. It is the worship of Jackals by Jackasses.
Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.
Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.
Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods.
Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.
For every problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
Giving every man a vote has no more made men wise and free than Christianity has made them good.
I believe in only one thing: liberty; but I do not believe in liberty enough to want to force it upon anyone.
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.
I never smoked a cigarette until I was nine.
If a politician found he had cannibals among his constituents, he would promise them missionaries for dinner.
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.
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.
It is impossible to imagine Goethe or Beethoven being good at billiards or golf.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Love is like war: easy to begin but very hard to stop.
Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.
Marriage is a wonderful institution, but who would want to live in an institution?
Men have a much better time of it than women. For one thing, they marry later; for another thing, they die earlier.
Morality is the theory that every human act must be either right or wrong, and that 99 % of them are wrong.
Most people want security in this world, not liberty.
No married man is genuinely happy if he has to drink worse whisky than he used to drink when he was single.
No matter how long he lives, no man ever becomes as wise as the average woman of forty-eight.
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.
Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.
Opera in English is, in the main, just about as sensible as baseball in Italian.
Puritanism. The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.
Say what you will about the ten commandments, you must always come back to the pleasant fact that there are only ten of them.
Temptation is a woman's weapon and man's excuse.
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 chief contribution of Protestantism to human thought is its massive proof that God is a bore.
The chief value of money lies in the fact that one lives in a world in which it is overestimated.
The common argument that crime is caused by poverty is a kind of slander on the poor.
The cynics are right nine times out of ten.
The most costly of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind.
The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.
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.
The opera is to music what a bawdy house is to a cathedral.
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 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.
Unquestionably, there is progress. The average American now pays out twice as much in taxes as he formerly got in wages.
War will never cease until babies begin to come into the world with larger cerebrums and smaller adrenal glands.
When a new source of taxation is found it never
means, in practice, that the old source is abandoned. It merely means
that the politicians have two ways of milking the taxpayer where they
had one before.
Whenever you hear a man speak of his love for his country, it is a sign that he expects to be paid for it.
