Say what you will about the Ten Commandments, you must always come back to the pleasant fact that there are only ten of them.

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

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

Philosophy consists very largely of one philosopher arguing that all others are jackasses. He usually proves it, and I should add that he also usually proves that he is one...

Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.

Never let your inferiors do you a favor - it will be extremely costly.

Misogynist: A man who hates women as much as women hate one another.

Men are the only animals that devote themselves, day in and day out, to making one another unhappy. It is an art like any other. Its virtuosi are called altruists.

Man is never honestly the fatalist, nor even the stoic. He fights his fate, often desperately. He is forever entering bold exceptions to the rulings of the bench of gods. This...

Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.

It is the dull man who is always sure, and the sure man who is always dull.

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.

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 impossible to imagine Goethe or Beethoven being good at billiards or golf.

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 even harder for the average ape to believe that he has descended from man.

Injustice is relatively easy to bear; what stings is justice.

In the United States, doing good has come to be, like patriotism, a favorite device of persons with something to sell.

I never lecture, not because I am shy or a bad speaker, but simply because I detest the sort of people who go to lectures and don't want to meet them.

I believe that all government is evil, and that trying to improve it is largely a waste of time.