1. “A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin.”
2. ”A great nation is any mob of people which produces at least one honest man a century.”
3. ”All men are frauds. The only difference between them is that some admit it. I myself deny it.”
4. “A man loses his sense of direction after four drinks; a woman loses hers after four kisses.”
5. ”And what is a good citizen? Simply one who never says, does or thinks anything that is unusual. Schools are maintained in order to bring this uniformity up to the highest possible point. A school is a hopper into which children are heaved while they are still young and tender; therein they are pressed into certain standard shapes and covered from head to heels with official rubber-stamps.”
6. “An enchanted life has many moments when the heart is overwhelmed with beauty and the imagination is electrified by some haunting quality in the world or by a spirit or voice speaking from deep within a thing, a place, or a person. Enchantment may be a state of rapture and ecstasy in which the soul comes to the foreground, and the literal concerns of survival and daily preoccupation at least momentarily fade into the background.”
7. ”An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup.”
8. “Any man who afflicts the human race with ideas must be prepared to see them misunderstood.”
9. “Conscience is the inner voice that warns us somebody may be looking.”
10. ”Correct spelling, indeed, is one of the arts that are far more esteemed by schoolma'ams than by practical men, neck-deep in the heat and agony of the world.”
11. ”Criticism is prejudice made plausible.”
12. ”Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.”
13. “Democracy is only a dream: it should be put in the same category as Arcadia, Santa Claus, and Heaven.”
14. "Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under."
15. “Every man is his own hell.”
16. ”Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit upon his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats”
17. “Explanations exist; they have existed for all times, for there is always an easy solution to every human problem - neat, plausible, and wrong.”
18. ”Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.”
19. ”For every human problem, there is a neat, simple solution; and it is always wrong.”
20. “I believe there is a limit beyond which free speech cannot go, but it's a limit that's very seldom mentioned. It's the point where free speech begins to collide with the right to privacy. I don't think there are any other conditions to free speech. I've got a right to say and believe anything I please, but I haven't got a right to press it on anybody else. .... Nobody's got a right to be a nuisance to his neighbors.”
21. ”If I ever marry, it will be on a sudden impulse - as a man shoots himself.”
22. “Imagine the Creator as a low comedian, and at once the world becomes explicable.”
23. ”Immorality: The morality of those who are having a better time.”
24. “In every unbeliever's heart there is an uneasy feeling that, after all, he may awake after death and find himself immortal.”
25. ”Injustice is relatively easy to bear; what stings is justice.”
26. “I read them all, sometimes with shivers of puzzlement and sometimes with delight, but always calling for more. I began to inhabit a world that was two-thirds letterpress and only one-third trees, fields, streets and people. I acquired round shoulders, spindly shanks, and a despondent view of humanity. I read everything that I could find in English, taking in some of it but boggling the rest.”
27. “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.”
28. ”It is the dull man who is always sure, and the sure man who is always dull.”
29. ”It is evident that scepticism, while it makes no actual change in man, always makes him feel better.”
30. “It is the invariable habit of bureaucracies, at all times and everywhere, to assume... that every citizen is a criminal. Their one apparent purpose, pursued with a relentless and furious diligence, is to convert the assumption into a fact. They hunt endlessly for proofs, and, when proofs are lacking, for mere suspicions. The moment they become aware of a definite citizen, John Doe, seeking what is his right under the law, they begin searching feverishly for an excuse for withholding it from him.”
31. ”Judge: a law student who marks his own papers.”
32. ”Life without sex might be safer but it would be unbearably dull. It is the sex instinct which makes women seem beautiful, which they are once in a blue moon, and men seem wise and brave, which they never are at all. Throttle it, denaturalize it, take it away, and human existence would be reduced to the prosaic, laborious, boresome, imbecile level of life in an anthill.”
33. "Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence."
34. ”Marriage is a wonderful institution, but who would want to live in an institution.”
35. ”Men become civilised, not in proportion to their willingness to believe, but in proportion to their readiness to doubt.”
36. “Most people want security in this world, not liberty.”
37. “Nature abhors a moron.”
38. "Nine times out of ten, in the arts as in life, there is actually no truth to be discovered; there is only error to be exposed."
39. ”No man ever quite believes in any other man.”
40. ”No matter how happily a woman may be married, it always pleases her to discover that there is a nice man who wishes that she were not.”
41. “No one in this world, so far as I know... has ever lost money by under estimating the intelligence of the great masses of plain people.”
42. “No one blames a man for believing that his wife is beautiful, but it is impossible to avoid disgust in the presence of one who believes that he has an immortal soul of some vaguely gaseous nature and that it will continue to exist four hundred million years after he has been shoveled away...”
43. ”Of all escape mechanisms, death is the most efficient.”
44. “Penetrating so many secrets, we cease to believe in the unknowable. But there it sits nevertheless, calmly licking its chops.”
45. “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 himself.”
46. “Psychology: The theory that the patient will probably get well anyhow, and is certainly a damned fool.”
47. "Puritanism - The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy."
48. ”Strike an average between what a woman thinks of her husband a month before she marries him and what she thinks of him a year afterward, and you will have the truth about him.”
49. “Temptation is a woman's weapon and a man's excuse.”
50. ”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.”
51. “The cosmos is a gigantic fly-wheel making 10,000 revolutions a minute. Man is a sick fly taking a dizzy ride on it. Religion is the theory that the wheel was designed and set spinning to give him the ride.”
52. “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.”
53. “The human race is divided into two sharply differentiated and mutually antagonistic classes, almost two genera- a small minority that plays with ideas and is capable of taking them in, and a vast majority that finds them painful, and is thus arrayed against them, and against all who have traffic with them. The intellectual heritage of the race belongs to the minority, and to the minority only. The majority has no more to do with it than it has to do with ecclesiastic politics on Mars. In so far as that heritage is apprehended, it is viewed with enmity. But in the main it is not apprehended at all.”
54. ”The military caste did not originate as a party of patriots, but as a party of bandits.”
55. “The notion that science does not concern itself with first causes -- that it leaves the field to theology or metaphysics, and confines itself to mere effects -- this notion has no support in the plain facts. If it could, science would explain the origin of life on earth at once -- and there is every reason to believe that it will do so on some not too remote tomorrow. To argue that gaps in knowledge which will confront the seeker must be filled, not by patient inquiry, but by intuition or revelation, is simply to give ignorance a gratuitous and preposterous dignity.”
56. ”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.”
57. “The only way to reconcile science and religion is to set up something which is not science and something that is not religion.”
58. “The proof of an idea is not to be sought in the soundness of the man fathering it, but in the soundness of the idea itself. One asks of a pudding, not if the cook who offers it is a good woman, but if the pudding itself is good.”
59. “The public demands certainties; it must be told definitely and a bit raucously that this is true and that is false. But there are no certainties.”
60. “There are no dull subjects. There are only dull writers.”
61. “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.”
62. “There is, in fact, no reason to believe that any given natural phenomenon, however marvelous it may seem today, will remain forever inexplicable. Soon or late the laws governing the production of life itself will be discovered in the laboratory, and man may set up business as a creator on his own account. The thing, indeed, is not only conceivable; it is even highly probable.”
63. “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.”
64. “The world always makes the assumption that the exposure of an error is identical with the discovery of truth--that the error and truth are simply opposite. They are nothing of the sort. What the world turns to, when it is cured on one error, is usually simply another error, and maybe one worse than the first one.”
65. “The worst government is 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.”
66. "To be in love is merely to be in a state of perceptual anesthesia--to mistake an ordinary young man for a Greek god or an ordinary young woman for a goddess."
67. “What men, in their egoism, constantly mistake for a deficiency of intelligence in woman is merely an incapacity for mastering that mass of small intellectual tricks, that complex of petty knowledges, that collection of cerebral rubber stamps, which constitutes the chief mental equipment of the average male. A man thinks that he is more intelligent than his wife because he can add up a column of figures more accurately, and because he understands the imbecile jargon of the stock market, and because he is able to distinguish between the ideas of rival politicians, and because he is privy to the minutiae of some sordid and degrading business or profession, say soap-selling or the law. But these empty talents, of course, are not really signs of a profound intelligence; they are, in fact, merely superficial accomplishments, and their acquirement puts little more strain on the mental powers than a chimpanzee suffers in learning how to catch a penny or scratch a match.”
68. ”We are here and now. Further than that, all knowledge is moonshine.”
69. "We are a nation of communities ...a brillant diversity spread like stars, like a thousand points of light in a broad peaceful sky."
70. "Whenever you hear a man speak of his love for his country it is a sign that he expects to be paid for it."
