The government consists of a gang of men exactly like you and me. They have, taking one with another, no special talent for the business of government; they have only a talent...

The demagogue is one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots.

The chief value of money lies in the fact that one lives in a world in which it is overestimated.

The capacity of human beings to bore one another seems to be vastly greater than that of any other animal.

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.