Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man's original virtue. It is through disobedience and rebellion that progress has been made.

In America the President reigns for four years, and Journalism governs for ever and ever.

To recommend thrift to the poor is both grotesque and insulting. It is like advising a man who is starving to eat less.

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written.

Women love us for our defects. If we have enough of them, they will forgive us everything, even our intellects.

Whenever a man does a thoroughly stupid thing, it is always from the noblest motives.

When a woman marries again, it is because she detested her first husband. When a man marries again, it is because he adored his first wife. Women try their luck; men risk theirs.

To get back my youth I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early, or be respectable.

There is a luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves, we feel that no one else has a right to blame us. It is the confession, not the priest, that gives us absolution.

The reason we all like to think so well of others is that we are all afraid for ourselves. The basis of optimism is sheer terror.

The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself.

The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it.

The advantage of the emotions is that they lead us astray, and the advantage of science is that it is not emotional.

Perhaps, after all, America never has been discovered. I myself would say that it had merely been detected.

One can always be kind to people about whom one cares nothing.

Nowadays most people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and discover when it is too late that the only things one never regrets are one's mistakes.

I love acting. It is so much more real than life.

I like persons better than principles, and I like persons with no principles better than anything else in the world.

I choose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for their good characters, and my enemies for their good intellects. A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his...

I can believe anything, provided that it is quite incredible.