Cool Quotes

I'm very pleased with each advancing year. It stems back to when I was forty. I was a bit upset about reaching that milestone, but an older friend consoled me. 'Don't complain about growing old -- many, many people do not have that privilege.'

Old age is not so bad when you consider the alternatives.

As for me, except for an occasional heart attack, I feel as young as I ever did.

You can live to be a hundred if you give up all the things that make you want to live to be a hundred.

Aggression

Aggression unchallenged is aggression unleashed.

Agnostic

In every unbeliever's heart there is an uneasy feeling that, after all, he may awake after death and find himself immortal. This is his punishment for his unbelief. This is the agnostic's Hell.

Alone

It is better to be alone than in ill company.

A man is never alone, not only because he is with himself and his own thoughts, but because he is with the Devil, who ever consorts with our solitude.

Ambition

Vain the ambition of kings
Who seek by trophies and dead things
To leave a living name behind,
And weave but nets to catch the wind.

It seems that ambition makes most people wish to be loved rather than to love others.

Be content with your lot; one cannot be first in everything.

America

In England I would rather be a man, a horse, a dog, or a woman, in that order. In America I think the order would be reversed.

I regard England as my wife and America as my mistress.

The European traveler in America -- at least if I may judge by myself -- is struck by two peculiarities: first, the extreme similarity of outlook in all parts of the United States (except the Old South), and secondly, the passionate desire of each locality to prove that it is peculiar and different from every other. The second of these is, of course, caused by the first.

Because I really want to live in a country where the poor people are fat.

The United States is a nation of laws: badly written and randomly enforced.

America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between.

America is not what's wrong with the world.

America is great because she is good, and if America ever ceases to be good, America will cease to be great.

I'll start to worry about America's standing in the world when people from all corners of the earth cease to want to come here.

America is harmless as an enemy and treacherous as a friend.

American

No one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.

The American people, taking one with another, constitute the most timorous, sniveling, poltroonish, ignominious mob of serfs and goosesteppers ever gathered under one flag in Christendom since the end of the Middle Ages.

The Americans are the illegitimate children of the English.

Americans are very smart about the things they care about, and ignorant about the things they don't.

Ammianus Marcellinus

Ammianus is so eloquent, that he writes nonsense.

Ancestry

I don't know who my grandfather was; I am much more concerned to know what his grandson will be.

Nothing is so soothing to our self-esteem as to find our bad traits in our forebears. It seems to absolve us.

It is certainly desirable to be well descended, but the glory belongs to our ancestors.

He who boasts of his descent praises another.

A mule always boasts that its ancestors were horses.

Speak of the moderns without contempt and of the ancients without idolatry; judge them all by their merits and not by their age.

Anger

The best cure for anger is delay.

How much more grievous are the consequences of anger than the causes of it.

Whate'er's begun in anger ends in shame.

When angry, count ten before you speak; if very angry, a hundred.

Anger is a vulgar passion directed to vulgar ends, and it always sinks to the level of its object.

The size of a man can be measured by the size of the thing that makes him angry.

He who is slow to anger is longer getting over it.

Never forget what a man says to you when he is angry.

An angry man [differs] from a madman only in the shorter time which his passion [endures].

"In your anger do not sin": Do not let the sun go down while you are still angry, and do not give the devil a foothold.

Animal

Odd things animals. All dogs look up to you. All cats look down to you. Only a pig looks at you as an equal.

A dog is the only thing on earth that loves you more than you love yourself.

The pig, if I am not mistaken,
Supplies us sausage, ham, and bacon.
Let others say his heart is big --
I call it stupid of the pig.

If you have no trouble, buy a goat.

Our toil is lessened, and our wealth is increased, by our dominion over the useful animals . . .

Answer

No answer is also an answer.

Antiquity

Let others praise ancient times; I am glad that I was born in these.

Damn the age; I will write for antiquity.

Appearance

All is not gold that shines like gold. (Non teneas aurum totum quod splendet ut aurum.)
Other translations:

Everything that glitters is not gold.
Do not hold as gold all that shines as gold.

Three-tenths of a good appearance are due to nature; seven-tenths to dress.

Appeasement

I . . . smell the stench of appeasement in the air.

Appetite

All man's efforts are for his mouth, yet his appetite is never satisfied.

Subdue your appetites, and you've conquered human nature.

Applause

When most the world applauds you, most beware:
'Tis often less a blessing than a snare.

Arab

Better the oppression of Turks than the justice of Arabs.

The life of a wandering Arab [in the time of Gibbon] is a life of danger and distress; and though sometimes, by rapine or exchange, he may appropriate the fruits of industry, a private citizen in Europe is in the possession of more solid and pleasing luxury than the proudest emir, who marches in the field at the head of ten thousand horse.

[The] noblest of [Arabs] united the love of arms with the profession of merchandise.

[Arabs are] a people, whom it is dangerous to provoke, and fruitless to attack.

But [the Arabs'] friendship was venal, their faith inconstant, their enmity capricious: it was an easier task to excite than to disarm these roving barbarians; and, in the familiar intercourse of war, they learned to see, and to despise, the splendid weakness both of Rome and of Persia.

The character of Hatem is the perfect model of Arabian virtue: he was brave and liberal, an eloquent poet, and a successful robber . . .

Arms

The principal foundations of all states are good laws and good arms; and there cannot be good laws where there are not good arms.

Both oligarch and tyrant mistrust the people, and therefore deprive them of their arms.

Army

An army of stags led by a lion is more to be feared than an army of lions led by a stag.

That's what an army is -- a mob; they don't fight with courage that's born in them, but with courage that's borrowed from their mass, and from their officers.

Arrogance

[Their] minds were not yet humbled to their condition . . .

Art

Art for art's sake makes no more sense than gin for gin's sake.

Life is short, art long, opportunity fleeting, experience treacherous, judgment difficult.

Art imitates nature as well as it can, as a pupil follows his master; thus it is a sort of grandchild of God.

You must treat a work of art like a great man: stand before it and wait patiently till it deigns to speak.

No one can explain how the notes of a Mozart melody, or the folds of a piece of Titian's drapery, produce their essential effects. If you do not feel it, no one can by reasoning make you feel it.

I don't know anything about art, but I know what I like.

Another unsettling element in modern art is that common symptom of immaturity, the dread of doing what has been done before.

By a curious confusion, many modern critics have passed from the proposition that a masterpiece may be unpopular to the other proposition that unless it is unpopular it cannot be a masterpiece.

Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.

Artist

The gods that first taught artists their craft laid a great curse on mankind.

Artists are on the average less happy than men of science.

Asceticism

There is no virtue in penance and fasting which waste the body; they are only fanatical and monkish.

A dominant religion is never ascetic.

Asceticism may be a mere expression of organic hardihood, disgusted with too much ease.

Asking

He that asketh faintly beggeth a denial.

The man who is afraid of asking is ashamed of learning.

Aspiration

Men would be angels, angels would be gods.

Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp,
Or what's Heaven for?

The aim, if reached or not, makes great the life:
Try to be Shakespeare, leave the rest to fate.

Hitch your wagon to a star.

Assassination

Assassination is the last resource of cowards.

Association

I am always longing to be with men more excellent than myself.

When a dove begins to associate with crows its feathers remain white but its heart grows black.

Astrology

[Astrology] is the excellent foppery of the world, that, when we are sick in fortune (often the surfeit of our own behavior) we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars; as if we were villains by necessity; fools by heavenly compulsion; knaves, thieves, and teachers by spherical predominance; drunkards, liars, and adulterers by an enforced obedience of planetary influence.

Astronomy

[The] sublime science of astronomy . . . elevates the mind of man to disdain his diminutive planet and momentary existence.

Atheism

It is atheism and blasphemy to dispute what God can do: good Christians content themselves with His will revealed in His Word.

A little philosophy inclineth man's mind to atheism; but depth in philosophy bringeth a man's mind about to religion.

The three great apostles of practical atheism, that make converts without persecuting, and retain them without preaching, are wealth, health, and power.

Practical atheism, seeing no guidance for human affairs but its own limited foresight, endeavors itself to play the god, and decide what will be good for mankind and what bad.

Atheist

The kingdom that is infested by atheists is beset by famine and disease and soon perishes.

To you I'm an atheist; to God, I'm the Loyal Opposition.

Attitude

A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort.

Audience

The best audience is intelligent, well-educated, and a little drunk.

Author

The best part of every author is in general to be found in his book, I assure you.

While an author is yet living we estimate his powers by his worst performance, and when he is dead we rate them by his best.

An author is like a baker; it is for him to make the sweets, and others to buy and enjoy them.

An author is a fool who, not content with boring those he lives with, insists on boring future generations.

Autobiography

Autobiography is now as common as adultery -- and hardly less reprehensible.

Awkwardness

Men lose more conquests by their own awkwardness than by any virtue in the woman.

Baby

A baby is an inestimable blessing and bother.

A baby is an alimentary canal with a loud voice at one end and no responsibility at the other.

Bachelor

A bachelor is a selfish, undeserving guy who has cheated some woman out of a divorce.

Bachelors know more about women than married men; if they didn't, they'd be married too.

Cock's bones! now again I stand
The jolliest bachelor i' th' land.

A single man has not nearly the value he would have in [a] state of union. He is an incomplete animal. He resembles the odd half of a pair of scissors.

An old bachelor is a poor critter.

A bachelor is one who enjoys the chase but does not eat the game.

Praise all wives, but remain a bachelor.

So long as a man is without a wife he is only half a man.

Bad

No man becomes bad all at once.

Balance

One who is serious all day will never have a good time, while one who is frivolous all day will never establish a household.

Bald

There is nothing more contemptible than a bald man who pretends to have hair.

Honest men grow gray; others grow bald.

Banana

Where the banana grows man is sensual and cruel.

Banker

A banker is a man who lends you an umbrella when the weather is fair, and takes it away from you when it rains.

Barbarian

[The Gauls] derided the hairy and gigantic savages of the North; their rustic manners, dissonant joy, voracious appetite, and their horrid appearance, equally disgusting to the sight and to the smell.

Bashfulness

To get thine ends, lay bashfulness aside;
Who fears to ask doth teach to be deny'd.

Though modesty be a virtue, yet bashfulness is a vice.

The bashful always lose.

Bastard

Those born of sinful intercourse are not counted as children.

Battle

Nothing except a battle lost can be half so melancholy as a battle won.

If your bayonet breaks, strike with the stock; if the stock gives way, hit with your fists; if your fists are hurt, bite with your teeth.

Battlefield

Well, well, General, bury these poor men, and let us say no more about it.

Beating

A spaniel, a woman, and a walnut tree,
The more they're beaten the better they be.

Beauty

Remember that the most beautiful things in the world are the most useless: peacocks and lilies, for instance.

Why is it that beautiful women never seem to have any curiosity?

Is it because they know they're classical? With classical things the Lord finished the job. Ordinary ugly people know they're deficient and they go on looking for the pieces.

Beauty and wisdom are seldom found together.

A holy woman may be beautiful by the gift of nature, but she must not give occasion to lust. If beauty be hers, so far from setting it off she ought rather to obscure it.

Had she deigned to remove her veil, God Himself would have fallen in love with her.

A poor beauty finds more lovers than husbands.

Beauty and sadness always go together.

We ascribe beauty to that which is simple; which has no superfluous parts; which exactly answers its end; which stands related to all things; which is the mean of many extremes.

It is better to be beautiful than to be good, but it is better to be good than to be ugly.

It is the beautiful bird which gets caged.

Beauty is a good letter of introduction.

Beauty and chastity are always quarreling.

[Beauty is] an outward gift which is seldom despised, except by those to whom it has been refused.

Bed

Loath to bed, and loath to rise.

No bed is big enough to hold three.

Bedroom

A husband and wife who have separate bedrooms have either drifted apart -- or found happiness.

Beef

Beefsteaks and porter are gude belly mortar.

Beer

He that drinks strong beer,
And goes to bed mellow,
Lives as he ought to live,
And dies a hearty fellow.

I wish to see this beverage become common instead of the whisky which kills one-third of our citizens, and ruins their families.

Here
With my beer
I sit,
While golden moments flit:
Alas!
They pass
Unheeded by:
And as they fly,
I,
Being dry,
Sit, idly sipping here
My beer.

There is no bad beer: some kinds are better than others.

Beethoven

Beethoven can write music, thank God -- but he can do nothing else on earth.

Beggar

Beggars should be abolished. It annoys one to give to them, and it annoys one not to give to them.

It is a beggar's pride that he is not a thief.

Beginning

The beginning is half of the whole.

Every beginning is hard.

Belief

I believe it because it is absurd.

We believe nothing so firmly as what we least know.

He does not believe that does not live according to his belief.

Believe only half of what you see and nothing that you hear.

Never tell all that you know, or do all that you can, or believe all that you hear.

Belief forms behavior.

I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong.

Every man, wherever he goes, is encompassed by a cloud of comforting convictions, which move with him like flies on a summer day.

Belisarius

The spectator and historian of [Belisarius's] exploits has observed, that amidst the perils of war, he was daring without rashness, prudent without fear, slow or rapid according to the exigencies of the moment; that in the deepest distress he was animated by real or apparent hope, but that he was modest and humble in the most prosperous fortune.

Belly

A full belly neither fights nor flies well.

Betrayal

You also, Brutus my son. (Et tu, Brute!, though Caesar reportedly said this in Greek).

Betting

The race is not always to the swift nor the battle to the strong -- but that's the way to bet.

Biography

Biography is one of the new terrors of death.

Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of the man -- the biography of the man himself cannot be written.

Birth

Birth, n. The first and direst of all disasters.

Blame

Blame is safer than praise.

Blessing

Judge none blessed before his death.

May your glass be ever full.
May the roof over your head be always strong.
And may you be in heaven half an hour
Before the Devil knows you're dead.

May you live as long as you want,
And never want as long as you live.

May your neighbors respect you,
Trouble neglect you,
The angels protect you,
And heaven accept you.

May the Good Lord take a liking to you, . . . but not too soon!

The LORD bless you and keep you;
the LORD make his face shine upon you and be gracious to you;
the LORD turn his face toward you and give you peace.

Book

Reading all the good books is like a conversation with the finest men of past centuries.

There is a great deal of difference between an eager man who wants to read a book and the tired man who wants a book to read.

Never lend books, for no one ever returns them; the only books I have in my library are books that other folk have lent me.

The books that the world calls immoral are the books that show the world its own shame.

I never can understand how two men can write a book together; to me that's like three people getting together to have a baby.

I am being frank about myself in this book. I tell of my first mistake on page 850.

If you cannot read all your books, at any rate handle, or, as it were, fondle them -- peer into them, let them fall open where they will, read from the first sentence that arrests the eye, set them back on their shelves with your own hands, arrange them on your own plan so that if you do not know what is in them, you will at least know where they are. Let them be your friends; let them at any rate be your acquaintances.

May blessings be upon the head of Cadmus, or the Phoenicians, or whoever invented books.

The multitude of books is a great evil. There is no limit to this fever for writing; every one must be an author; some out of vanity, to acquire celebrity and raise up a name, others for the sake of mere gain.

Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.

A great [large] book is a great evil.

I keep to old books, for they teach me something; from the new I learn very little.

My books are friends that never fail me.

Books are a triviality. Life alone is great.

A room without books is like a body without a soul.

Bore

Bore, n. A person who talks when you wish him to listen.

The secret of being a bore is to tell everything.

Boredom

When people are bored, it is primarily with their own selves that they are bored.

Boredom is an evil that is not to be estimated lightly. It can come in the end to real despair. The public authority takes precautions against it everywhere, as against other universal calamities.

Ennui has made more gamblers than avarice, more drunkards than thirst, and perhaps as many suicides as despair.

Boredom is a vital problem for the moralist, since at least half the sins of mankind are caused by the fear of it.

Good-bye. I am leaving because I am bored.

Borrowing And Lending

Borrowing is not much better than begging.

Neither a borrower nor a lender be;
For loan oft loses both itself and friend,
And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry.

Boy

A boy is, of all wild beasts, the most difficult to manage.

The parent who could see his boy as he really is, would shake his head and say, "Willie is no good; I'll sell him."

One boy is more trouble than a dozen girls.

The fact that boys are allowed to exist at all is evidence of a remarkable Christian forbearance among men.

A boy is a cross between a god and a goat.

Bravery

Some have been thought brave because they were afraid to run away.

He was a bold man that first ate an oyster.

Breeding

Birth's gude but breeding's better.

Brevity

I have only made this letter rather long because I have not had time to make it shorter.

Do you wish to instruct? Be brief, that the mind may catch thy precepts and the more easily retain them.

In order to speak short upon any subject, think long.

That which is brief, if it be good, is good twice over.

It is not the burden but the overburden that kills the beast.

Brevity is the soul of wit.

Bridegroom

A bridegroom is a guy who has lost his liberty in the pursuit of happiness.

British

Socialism has been preached for so long, the British people no longer have any sense of personal responsibility.

Building

Build and borrow,
A sackful of sorrow.
(Bauen und Borgen,
Ein Sack voll Sorgen.)

Burden

Light burdens, long borne, grow heavy.

Bureaucracy

I think we have more machinery of government than is necessary, too many parasites living on the labor of the industrious.

The only thing that saves us from the bureaucracy is inefficiency. An efficient bureaucracy is the greatest threat to liberty.

Hell hath no fury like a bureaucrat scorned.

The behavior of any bureaucratic organization can best be understood by assuming that it is controlled by a secret cabal of its enemies.

It must not be forgotten that it is especially dangerous to enslave men in the minor details of life.

Business

The Peter Principle: In a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to the level of his incompetence.

The basic concept of the Dilbert Principle is that the most ineffective workers are systematically moved to the place where they can do the least damage: management.

If I were a medical man, I should prescribe a holiday to any patient who considered his work important.

Some see private enterprise as a predatory target to be shot, others as a cow to be milked, but few are those who see it as a sturdy horse pulling the wagon.

Businessmen are notable for a peculiarly stalwart character, which enables them to enjoy without loss of self-reliance the benefits of tariffs, franchises, and even outright government subsidies.

The egalitarianism of the present tax structure is thought to be seriously dampening individual effort, initiative, and inspiration . . . [it] destroys ambition, penalizes success, discourages investment to create new jobs, and may well turn a nation of risk-taking entrepreneurs into a nation of softies.

It is a socialist idea that making profits is a vice; I consider the real vice is making losses.

Planned Economy: Where everything is included in the plans except economy.

No matter what you think your job is, your job is to make your boss's life easier.

Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.

A man's work is his dilemma: his job is his bondage, but it also gives him a fair share of his identity and keeps him from being a bystander in somebody else's world.

Committee: A group of the unfit appointed by the unwilling to do the unnecessary.

It's a recession when your neighbor loses his job, it's a depression when you lose your own.

Meetings are indispensable when you don't want to do anything.

He had talents equal to business, and aspired no higher.

Successful investing is anticipating the anticipations of others.

If you owe the bank a thousand dollars, you have a problem; if you owe the bank a million dollars, the bank has a problem.

[The] clamour and sophistry of merchants and manufacturers easily persuade [the people], that the private interest of a part, and of a subordinate part, of the society, is the general interest of the whole.

Busy

None are so busy as the fool and knave.

He that is busy is tempted by but one devil; he that is idle, by a legion.

The busiest men have the most leisure.

The busy have no time for tears.

Busybody

It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.

Buyer

Let the buyer beware. (Caveat emptor.)

Cabbage

Cabbage twice cooked is death.

Calm

If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs, then it's possible that you don't fully understand the situation.

Canada

I wish the British Government would give you Canada at once. It is fit for nothing but to breed quarrels.

Canada could have enjoyed:
English government,
French culture,
and American know-how.
Instead it ended up with:
English know-how,
French government,
and American culture.

England would be better off without Canada; it keeps her in a prepared state for war at a great expense and constant irritation.

Canadian

Americans are benevolently ignorant about Canada, while Canadians are malevolently well informed about the United States.

Capitalist

The trouble with socialism is socialism. The trouble with capitalism is capitalists.

Carefulness

If you can't be good be careful.

Carelessness

The wife of a careless man is almost a widow.

Caroline of England

Most gracious queen, we thee implore
To go away and sin no more,
But if that effort be too great,
To go away at any rate.

Cartel

People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.

In a free trade, an effectual combination cannot be established but by the unanimous consent of every single trader, and it cannot last longer than every single trader continues of the same mind. The majority of a corporation can enact a bye-law, with proper penalties, which will limit the competition more effectually and more durably than any voluntary combination whatever.

Carthage

That country [Carthage] was rapidly sinking into the state of barbarism from whence it had been raised by the Phoenician colonies and Roman laws; and every step of intestine discord was marked by some deplorable victory of savage man over civilized society.

Cash

In God we trust; all others must pay cash.

Casuist

There is a demand today for men who can make wrong appear right.

Cat

When I play with my cat, who knows whether I do not make her more sport than she makes me?

Stately, kindly, lordly friend
Condescend
Here to sit by me.

Any member introducing a dog into the Society's premises shall be liable to a fine of £10. Any animal leading a blind person shall be deemed to be a cat.

Cause And Effect

For want of a nail the shoe is lost; for want of a shoe the horse is lost; and for want of a horse the rider is lost.

The thorns which I have reap'd are of the tree I planted.

After this, therefore because of this. (Post hoc, ergo propter hoc.)

Caution

The cautious seldom make mistakes.

Think much and often, speak little, and write less.

If not chastely, then at least cautiously. (Nisi caste, saltem caute.)

Drive carefully. We have two cemeteries [but] no hospital.

Celibacy

Marriage may often be a stormy lake, but celibacy is almost always a muddy horsepond.

Cemetery

The fence around a cemetery is foolish, for those inside can't get out and those outside don't want to get in.

He who seeks equality should go to a cemetery.

Centralization

If ever this vast country is brought under a single government, it will be one of the most extensive corruption.

Certainty

The public, with its mob yearning to be instructed, edified and pulled by the nose, demands certainties; it must be told definitely and a bit raucously that this is true and that is false. But there are no certainties.

If you forsake a certainty and depend on an uncertainty, you will lose both the certainty and the uncertainty.

In all affairs it's a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted.

Not to be absolutely certain is, I think, one of the essential things in rationality.

Chance

The race is not to the swift
or the battle to the strong,
nor does food come to the wise
or wealth to the brilliant
or favor to the learned;
but time and chance happen to them all.

Change

Remember that there is nothing stable in human affairs; therefore avoid undue elation in prosperity, or undue depression in adversity.

There is nothing more difficult to carry out, nor more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to handle, than to initiate a new order of things. For the reformer has enemies in all those who profit by the old order, and only lukewarm defenders in all those who would profit by the new . . .

Everything changes but the avant-garde.

Character

There are things about me you wouldn't understand, things you couldn't understand, things you shouldn't understand.

The louder he talked of his honour, the faster we counted our spoons.

Our deeds determine us, as much as we determine our deeds.

A man never discloses his own character so clearly as when he describes another's.

If I keep my good character, I shall be rich enough.

Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power.

There is something even more valuable to civilization than wisdom, and that is character.

The older I grow the less I esteem mere ideas. In politics, particularly, they are transient and unimportant. . . . There are only men who have character and men who lack it.

Mankind is made up of inconsistencies, and no man acts invariably up to his predominant character. The wisest man sometimes acts weakly, and the weakest sometimes wisely.

When wealth is lost, nothing is lost;
When health is lost, something is lost;
When character is lost, all is lost!

But the human character, however it may be exalted or depressed by a temporary enthusiasm, will return by degrees to its proper and natural level, and will resume those passions that seem the most adapted to its present condition.

Charity

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.

Charity and pride have different aims, yet both feed the poor.

He gives twice that gives soon; i.e., he will soon be called to give again.

I cannot describe to you the despairing sensation of trying to do something for a man who seems incapable or unwilling to do anything further for himself.

Do not tell me of my obligation to put all poor men in good situations. Are they my poor? I tell thee, thou foolish philanthropist, that I grudge the dollar, the dime, the cent I give to such men as do not belong to me and to whom I do not belong.

With one hand I take thousands of rubles from the poor, and with the other I hand back a few kopecks.

The charity that hastens to proclaim its good deeds, ceases to be charity, and is only pride and ostentation.

Charm

Charming people live up to the very edge of their charm, and behave as outrageously as the world will let them.

All charming people, I fancy, are spoiled. It is the secret of their attraction.

Chastity

Give me chastity and continence, but not just now.

An untempted woman cannot boast of her chastity.

Although the progress of civilization has undoubtedly contributed to assuage the fiercer passions of human nature, it seems to have been less favorable to the virtue of chastity . . . The refinements of life corrupt while they polish the intercourse of the sexes.

A reputation for chastity is necessary to a woman. Chastity itself is also sometimes useful.

Cheapness

What we obtain too cheap we esteem too lightly; it is dearness only that gives everything its value.

Cheating

He that cheats me once, shame on him; he that cheats me twice, shame on me. (He that cheats me ance, shame fa' him; he that cheats me twice; shame fa' me.)

Cheerfulness

Be cheerful while you are alive.

Chicago

Chicago has a strange metaphysical elegance of death about it.

Child

The child is not the mere creature of the state.

A child is a lifetime of worry.

Small child, small problems. Big child, big problems.

Even very young children need to be informed about dying. Explain the concept of death very carefully to your child. This will make threatening him with it much more effective.

Childhood

Grow up, and that is a terribly hard thing to do. It is much easier to skip it and go from one childhood to another.

Childless

The childless escape much misery.

Children

I am married to Beatrice Salkeld, a painter. We have no children, except me.

Children enjoy the present because they have neither a past nor a future.

Insanity is hereditary. You get it from your children.

Anybody who hates children and dogs can't be all bad.

Children begin by loving their parents. After a time they judge them. Rarely, if ever, do they forgive them.

Children seldom misquote you. In fact, they usually repeat word for word what you shouldn't have said.

I take my children everywhere, but they always find their way back home.

My husband and I are either going to buy a dog or have a child. We can't decide whether to ruin our carpet or ruin our lives.

Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these.

He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune, for they are impediments to great enterprises.

When children stand quiet they have done some ill.

We are given children to test us and make us more spiritual.

Learning to dislike children at an early age saves a lot of expense and aggravation later in life.

Every generation faces a barbarian invasion in the form of its own children, who need to be civilized.

Christianity

To be mistaken in believing that the Christian religion is true is no great loss to anyone; but how dreadful to be mistaken in believing it to be false!

City

I'd rather wake up in the middle of nowhere than in any city on earth.

Civilization

Civilizations die from suicide, not murder.

Yet the experience of four thousand years should enlarge our hopes, and diminish our apprehensions: we cannot determine to what height the human species may aspire in their advances towards perfection; but it may safely be presumed, that no people, unless the face of nature is changed, will relapse into their original barbarism.

Civilization is an enormous improvement on the lack thereof.

A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself within.

Civilization is not an evolution of mankind but the imposition of human good on human evil. It is not a historical inevitability. It is a battle that has to be fought every day, because evil doesn't recede willingly before the wheels of progress.

Clarity

A charlatan makes obscure what is clear; a thinker makes clear what is obscure.

Cleanliness

There was no need to do any housework at all. After the first four years the dirt doesn't get any worse.

Cleanliness and order are not matters of instinct; they are matters of education, and like most great things, you must cultivate a taste for them.

Clothes

Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.

Common Sense

Nothing astonishes men so much as common sense and plain dealing.

Communism

The theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.

Communism requires of its adherents that they arise early and participate in a strenuous round of calisthenics. To someone who wishes that cigarettes came already lit the thought of such exertion at an hour when decent people are just nodding off is thoroughly abhorrent.

Communism is the opiate of the intellectuals.

I sometimes think that the entire [Communist movement] was just a front for the cement industry.

Losing you is not a loss, and keeping you is no specific gain.

Community Organizer

Like most people, I have no wish to live in a community organized by community organizers.

Competence

Of all the human qualities, the one I admire the most is competence. A tailor who is really able to cut and fit a coat seems to me an admirable man, and by the same token a university professor who knows little or nothing of the thing he presumes to teach seems to me to be a fraud and a rascal.

Complexity

Increasingly, people seem to misinterpret complexity as sophistication, which is baffling -- the incomprehensible should cause suspicion rather than admiration. Possibly this trend results from a mistaken belief that using a somewhat mysterious device confers an aura of power on the user.

Compliment

There is nothing you can say in answer to a compliment. I have been complimented myself a great many times, and they always embarrass me -- I always feel that they have not said enough.

Composer

The good composer is slowly discovered, the bad composer is slowly found out.

The public doesn't want new music; the main thing that it demands of a composer is that he be dead.

Computer

Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.

To err is human, but to really foul things up requires a computer.

Anyone who considers arithmetical methods of producing random numbers is, of course, in a state of sin.

Computer Programming

Real programmers don't comment their code. It was hard to write, it should be hard to understand.

A good programmer can overcome a poor language or a clumsy operating system, but even a great programming environment will not rescue a bad programmer.

[The C programming language] is a razor-sharp tool, with which one can create an elegant and efficient program or a bloody mess.

Sometimes a programmer confronted with a problem thinks "I know, I'll use regular expressions." Now he has two problems.

Let us change our traditional attitude to the construction of programs. Instead of imagining that our main task is to instruct a computer what to to, let us concentrate rather on explaining to human beings what we want a computer to do.

Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight.

As soon as we started programming, we found to our surprise that it wasn't as easy to get programs right as we had thought. Debugging had to be discovered. I can remember the exact instant when I realized that a large part of my life from then on was going to be spent in finding mistakes in my own programs.

[The C programming language] makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot; C++ makes it harder, but when you do, it blows your whole leg off.

Theory is when you know something, but it doesn't work. Practice is when something works, but you don't know why. Programmers combine theory and practice: Nothing works and they don't know why.

When someone says, "I want a programming language in which I need only say what I want done," give him a lollipop.

That's the thing about people who think they hate computers. What they really hate is lousy programmers.

Einstein argued that there must be simplified explanations of nature, because God is not capricious or arbitrary. No such faith comforts the software engineer.

PHP is a minor evil perpetrated and created by incompetent amateurs, whereas Perl is a great and insidious evil, perpetrated by skilled but perverted professionals.

We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil.

Correctness is clearly the prime quality. If a system does not do what it is supposed to do, then everything else about it matters little.

The most amazing achievement of the computer software industry is its continuing cancellation of the steady and staggering gains made by the computer hardware industry.

To this very day, idiot software managers measure "programmer productivity" in terms of "lines of code produced," whereas the notion of "lines of code spent" is much more appropriate.

Con Man

[Con] men have long known . . . that their job is not to convince skeptics but to enable the gullible to continue to believe what they want to believe.

Confidence

Positive, adj. Mistaken at the top of one's voice.

Rational confidence [is] the just result of knowledge and experience.

Conformity

Since it is now fashionable to laugh at the conservative French Academy, I have remained a rebel by joining it.

Congress

It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress.

Reader, suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.

Oh, I don't blame Congress. If I had $600 billion at my disposal, I'd be irresponsible, too.

Conquest

A philosopher may deplore the eternal discords of the human race, but he will confess, that the desire of spoil is a more rational provocation than the vanity of conquest.

Resistance was fatal; flight was impracticable; and the patient submission of helpless innocence seldom found mercy from the Barbarian conqueror.

Conscience

The Anglo-Saxon conscience does not prevent the Anglo-Saxon from sinning, it merely prevents him from enjoying his sin.

Conscience is what hurts when everything else feels so good.

Bachelors have consciences. Married men have wives.

Cowardice asks: Is it safe? Expediency asks: Is it politic? But Conscience asks: Is it right?

Consensus

Consensus is the absence of leadership.

Nothing is more obstinate than a fashionable consensus.

To me, consensus seems to be the process of abandoning all beliefs, principles, values and policies. So it is something in which no one believes and to which no one objects.

Conservation

Because we can expect future generations to be richer than we are, no matter what we do about resources, asking us to refrain from using resources now so that future generations can have them later is like asking the poor to make gifts to the rich.

Conservative

I am a Conservative to preserve all that is good in our constitution, a Radical to remove all that is bad. I seek to preserve property and to respect order, and I equally decry the appeal to the passions of the many or the prejudices of the few.

Consistency

Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.

Consistency requires you to be as ignorant today as you were a year ago.

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.

When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?

Controversy

The most savage controversies are those about matters as to which there is no good evidence either way.

Conversation

A gossip talks about others, a bore talks about himself -- and a brilliant conversationalist talks about you.

Learned conversation is either the affectation of the ignorant or the profession of the mentally unemployed.

Talk to every woman as if you loved her, and to every man as if he bored you . . .

I like to do all the talking myself. It saves time, and prevents arguments.

Courage

[Courage] arises in a great measure from the consciousness of strength . . .

Courage And Cowardice

The human race is a race of cowards; and I am not only marching in that procession but carrying a banner.

There are several good protections against temptation, but the surest is cowardice.

We must indeed all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately.

Cowards die many times before their deaths;
The valiant never taste of death but once.

To persevere, trusting in what hopes he has, is courage in a man. The coward despairs.

The better part of valor is discretion.

[William Strunk Jr.] scorned the vague, the tame, the colorless, the irresolute. He felt it was worse to be irresolute than to be wrong.

There is nothing more exhilarating than to be shot at without result.

Valor, n. A soldierly compound of vanity, duty, and the gambler's hope.

Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear -- not absence of fear.

Be strong and courageous. Do not be terrified; do not be discouraged, for the LORD your God will be with you wherever you go.

There grows
No herb of help to heal a coward heart.

It is curious that physical courage should be so common in the world and moral courage so rare.

Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die.

I scorned the sword of Catiline, I will not quail before yours.

Coward

I was a coward on instinct.

Creation

Had I been present at the Creation, I would have given some useful hints for the better ordering of the universe.

Creativity

The most gifted members of the human species are at their creative best when they cannot have their way, and must compensate for what they miss by realizing and cultivating their capacities and talents.

Crime And Punishment

Hanging one scoundrel, it appears, does not deter the next. Well, what of it? The first one is at least disposed of.

The argument that capital punishment degrades the state is moonshine, for if that were true then it would degrade the state to send men to war. . . . The state, in truth, is degraded in its very nature: a few butcheries cannot do it any further damage.

But I wonder where we will land if trial judges begin deciding that the fact that a man has committed an atrocious crime is proof sufficient that he is not responsible for his acts.

[The] penalty of death was abolished in the Roman empire, a law of mercy most delightful to the humane theorist, but of which the practice, in a large and vicious community, is seldom consistent with the public safety.

Critic

Critics are like eunuchs in a harem: they know how it's done, they've seen it done every day, but they're unable to do it themselves.

The critic has to educate the public; the artist has to educate the critic.

Criticism

Taking to pieces is the trade of those who cannot construct.

To avoid criticism do nothing, say nothing, be nothing.

The most worthless of mankind are not afraid to condemn in others the same disorders which they allow in themselves; and can readily discover some nice difference of age, character, or station, to justify the partial distinction.

To find a fault is easy; to do better may be difficult.

Cruelty

All cruelty springs from weakness.

Curiosity

Curiosity is a lust of the mind.

The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.

Curiosity is the very basis of education and if you tell me that curiosity killed the cat, I say only that the cat died nobly.

Curse

May you live in interesting times.

Custom

Custom does often reason overrule
And only serves for reason to the fool.

You say that it is your [Hindu] custom to burn widows. Very well. We [British] also have a custom: When men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours.

Cynicism

Cynicism -- the intellectual cripple's substitute for intelligence.

A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin.

Cynic -- a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.

Cynic, n. A blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be. Hence the custom among the Scythians of plucking out a cynic's eyes to improve his vision.

Dancing

Dancing begets warmth, which is the parent of wantonness. It is, Sir, the great grandfather of cuckoldom.

Music and dancing (the more's the pity) have become so closely associated with ideas of riot and debauchery among the less cultivated classes, that a taste for them, for their own sakes, can hardly be said to exist, and before they can be recommended as innocent or safe amusements, a very great change of ideas must take place.

Custom has made dancing sometimes necessary for a young man; therefore mind it while you learn it, that you may learn to do it well, and not be ridiculous, though in a ridiculous act.

Listen, sister. I don't dance and I can't take time out now to learn.

There are those who dance to the rhythm that is played to them, those who only dance to their own rhythm, and those who don't dance at all.

How inimitably graceful children are in general before they learn to dance!

Mr. Lincoln at least you're a man of honor. You said you wanted to dance with me in the worst way, and I must say that you've kept your word. That's the worst way I've ever seen.

Dark Ages

The dark cloud, which had been cleared by the Phoenician discoveries, and finally dispelled by the arms of Caesar, again settled on the shores of the Atlantic, and a Roman province [Britain] was again lost among the fabulous Islands of the Ocean.

Day

Seize the day, put no trust in the morrow! (Carpe diem, quàm minimùm credula postero.)

Deadpan Humor

Ginsberg's Theorem:

You can't win.
You can't break even.
You can't even quit the game.

You know when you're sitting on a chair and you lean back so you're just on two legs then you lean too far and you almost fall over but at the last second you catch yourself? I feel like that all the time.

I filled out an application that said, "In Case Of Emergency Notify". I wrote "Doctor" . . . What's my mother going to do?

Reverend Lovejoy: Oh, come on, Lisa, now you're here for a reason. Is your father stealing bread?
Lisa: Maybe. I don't watch him every minute.

Boy, life takes a long time to live.

For my birthday I got a humidifier and a de-humidifier. I put them in the same room and let them fight it out.

I argue very well. Ask any of my remaining friends. I can win an argument on any topic, against any opponent. People know this, and steer clear of me at parties. Often, as a sign of their great respect, they don't even invite me.

The other day I . . . uh, no, that wasn't me.

What if everything is an illusion and nothing exists? In that case, I definitely overpaid for my carpet.

When I was crossing the border into Canada, they asked if I had any firearms with me. I said, "Well, what do you need?"

When I woke up this morning, my girlfriend asked if I had slept well. I said, "No, I made a few mistakes."

You can't have everything. Where would you put it?

Most of the time I don't have much fun. The rest of the time I don't have any fun at all.

If you don't go to people's funerals, they won't come to yours.

It is illegal to make liquor privately or water publicly.

Good night to spend with family, but avoid arguments with your mate's new lover.

My boyfriend and I broke up. He wanted to get married, and I didn't want him to.

I told my psychiatrist that everyone hates me. He said I was being ridiculous -- everyone hasn't met me yet.

Prostitution gives her an opportunity to meet people. It provides fresh air and wholesome exercise, and it keeps her out of trouble.

It may be that your whole purpose in life is simply to serve as a warning to others.

Paul's Law: You can't fall off the floor.

Lowery's Law: If it jams, force it. If it breaks, it needed replacing anyway.

Chaos, panic, and disorder. My work here is done.

Homer: You know, Marge, that Bart is a little miracle -- his winning smile, his button nose, his fat little stomach, his face alight with wholesome mischief. He reminds me of me before the weight of the world crushed my spirit.

Don't knock masturbation. It's sex with someone I love.

More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.

There are no stupid questions, but there are a lot of inquisitive idiots.

Instead of giving a politician the keys to the city, it might be better to change the locks.

My wife and I were happy for twenty years. Then we met.

Homer: Marge, I'm going to miss you so much. And it's not just the sex. It's also the food preparation.

Homer: Trying is the first step toward failure.

Grandpa: I used to be with it, but then they changed what "it" was. Now, what I'm with isn't it, and what's "it" seems weird and scary to me.

Someday I want to be rich. Some people get so rich they lose all respect for humanity. That's how rich I want to be.

My husband gave me a necklace. It's fake. I requested fake. Maybe I'm paranoid, but in this day and age, I don't want something around my neck that's worth more than my head.

Is sloppiness in speech caused by ignorance or apathy? I don't know and I don't care.

Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.

When I have a kid, I wanna put him in one of those strollers for twins, then run around the mall looking frantic.

Sometimes I lie awake at night, and I ask, "Where have I gone wrong?" Then a voice says to me, "This is going to take more than one night."

I drive way too fast to worry about cholesterol.

After handing him a report card filled with F's, the boy asked his father, "Do you think the problem is my heredity or my upbringing?"

Nowadays men lead lives of noisy desperation.

Build a man a fire, and he'll be warm for a day. Set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.

If I could drop dead right now, I'd be the happiest man alive.

Success didn't spoil me, I've always been insufferable.

When I was a little kid, we had a quicksand box. I was an only child . . . eventually.

A friend is someone who will help you move. A real friend is someone who will help you move a body.

My theory is that all of Scottish cuisine is based on a dare.

They say such nice things about people at their funerals that it makes me sad to realize that I'm going to miss mine by just a few days.

I ask for so little. And boy do I get it.

I was going to buy a copy of The Power of Positive Thinking, and then I thought: What the hell good would that do?

Marge: Growing up means giving up everything that makes you happy.

Death

The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.

I'm not afraid to die. I just don't want to be there when it happens.

He was dying all his life.

It is the duty of a doctor to prolong life and it is not his duty to prolong the act of dying.

I want to die peacefully in my sleep like my grandfather, not screaming and terrified like his passengers.

O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?

A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic.

Birth, copulation, and death.
That's all the facts when you come to brass tacks.

Nearby, a younger man was nursing a martini and a cigarette, slowly dying by his own hand.

The wailing of the newborn infant is mingled with the dirge for the dead.

Man weeps to think that he will die so soon; woman, that she was born so long ago.

We should weep for men at their birth, not at their death.

Up, sluggard, and waste not life; in the grave will be sleeping enough.

Millions long for immortality who do not know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon.

Dying is a very dull, dreary affair. My advice to you is to have nothing whatever to do with it.

Death is nature's way of telling you to slow down.

For three days after death, hair and fingernails continue to grow but phone calls taper off.

The late F. W. H. Myers used to tell how he asked a man at a dinner table what he thought would happen to him when he died. The man tried to ignore the question, but, on being pressed, replied: "Oh well, I suppose I shall inherit eternal bliss, but I wish you wouldn't talk about such unpleasant subjects."

Eternity is a terrible thought. I mean, where's it going to end?

I did not attend his funeral; but I wrote a nice letter saying I approved of it.

I have had a number of threatening letters each week, some telling me the actual time and method of my death, and I don't like it.

After death there is nothing.

We begin to die at birth; the end flows from the beginning.

No one wept for the dead, because everyone expected death itself.

It was a time when only the dead smiled, happy in their peace.

Why is it that we rejoice at a birth and grieve at a funeral? It is because we are not the person involved.

Death is nothing to us, since when we are, death has not come, and when death has come, we are not.

From too much love of living,
From hope and fear set free,
We thank with brief thanksgiving
Whatever gods may be
That no man lives forever,
That dead men rise up never;
That even the weariest river
Winds somewhere safe to sea.

All come from dust, and to dust all return.

And I declared that the dead,
who had already died,
are happier than the living,
who are still alive.

Naked a man comes from his mother's womb,
and as he comes, so he departs.

The King is dead! Long live the King!

[Sara and I] have parted forever, though my ashes will soon be mingling with hers. I'll have her in mind until thought and memory adjourn, but that is all . . . We were happy together, but all beautiful things must end.

The world is so ordered that we must, in a material sense, lose everything we have and love, one thing after another, until we ourselves close our eyes.

There is no such thing as bad publicity except your own obituary.

. . . for dust you are and to dust you will return.

What I look forward to is continued immaturity followed by death.

He was released from the miseries of life . . .

Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It's the transition that's troublesome.

Death is not the worst than can happen to men.

[Pyrrhus] grieved greatly over the death of Aeropus; not so much because he was dead, for that, he said, was the common lot of mankind, but because he himself had delayed repaying him a kindness until it was too late. Debts of money, he said, can be paid to the heirs of a creditor, but men of honour are grieved at not being able to return a kindness during the lifetime of their benefactor.

[They] were leveled in the grave . . .

[The] groans of the dying excited only the envy of their surviving friends.

For I am already being poured out like a drink offering, and the time has come for my departure.

As a well-spent day brings happy sleep, so life well used brings happy death.

Do not fear death so much, but rather the inadequate life.

I guess that's how death works. It doesn't matter if we're ready or not. It just happens.

Of human life, the most glorious or humble prospects are alike and soon bounded by the sepulchre.

Nothing in his life
Became him like the leaving it.

Decisiveness

Make a decision, even if it's wrong.

Deliberation

Deliberation, n. The act of examining one's bread to determine which side it is buttered on.

Democracy

Under democracy, one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule -- and both commonly succeed and are right.

Man's capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but man's inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.

Democracy is a kingless regime infested by many kings who are sometimes more exclusive, tyrannical, and destructive than one, if he be a tyrant.

It has been said that Democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.

Democracy is . . . a form of religion; it is the worship of jackals by jackasses.

Democracy substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few.

High hopes were once formed of democracy; but democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people.

Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.

Under a democratical government, the citizens exercise the powers of sovereignty; and those powers will be first abused, and afterwards lost, if they are committed to an unwieldy multitude.

Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.

But a wild democracy . . . too often disdains the essential principles of justice.

The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not.

Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half the time.

Our great democracies still tend to think that a stupid man is more likely to be honest than a clever man.

Democrat

I belong to no organized party -- I am a Democrat.

The Democratic Party is like a mule -- without pride of ancestry or hope of posterity.

Republicans raise dahlias, Dalmatians, and eyebrows. Democrats raise Airedales, kids, and taxes.

Republicans sleep in twin beds -- some even in separate rooms. That is why there are more Democrats.

My Grandmother wouldn't even speak the word Democrat if there were children in the room, she'd say Bastards instead.

Depth

Smooth runs the water where the brook is deep.

Despair

I have seen all the things that are done under the sun; all of them are meaningless, a chasing after the wind.

[Job's] wife said to him, "Are you still holding on to your integrity? Curse God and die!"

Never despair; but if you do, work on in despair.

Desperation

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation.

Nowadays men lead lives of noisy desperation.

Despot

A nation ignorant of the equal benefits of liberty and law, must be awed by the flashes of arbitrary power: the cruelty of a despot will assume the character of justice; his profusion, of liberality; his obstinacy, of firmness.

Despotism

Despotism is unjust to everybody, including the despot, who was probably made for better things.

The progress of despotism tends to disappoint its own purpose.

Destiny

Destiny is not a matter of chance, it is a matter of choice; it is not a thing to be waited for, it is a thing to be achieved.

Destruction

To build may have to be the slow and laborious task of years. To destroy can be the thoughtless act of a single day.

Detail

Our life is frittered away by detail . . . Simplify, simplify!

Dictator

Dictators ride to and for on tigers from which they dare not dismount. And the tigers are getting hungry.

Difference

[The] difference of language, dress, and manners . . . severs and alienates the nations of the globe.

Difficulty

When you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.

Diplomat

I have discovered the art of deceiving diplomats. I tell them the truth and they never believe me.

Direction

If we don't change the direction we are headed, we will end up where we are going.

Disagreement

When you start off by telling those who disagree with you that they are not merely in error but in sin, how much of a dialogue do you expect?

Arguments are to be avoided; they are always vulgar and often convincing.

Discipline

He who spares the rod hates his son,
but he who loves him is careful to discipline him.

[The] LORD disciplines those he loves, and he punishes everyone he accepts as a son.

Disease

Disease generally begins that equality which death completes.

Divorce

Conrad Hilton was very generous to me in the divorce settlement. He gave me 5,000 Gideon Bibles.

Alimony is a system by which, when two people make a mistake, one of them continues to pay for it.

Alimony is like buying oats for a dead horse.

I heard from my cat's lawyer today. My cat wants $12,000 a week for Tender Vittles.

Zsa Zsa Gabor is an expert housekeeper. Every time she gets divorced, she keeps the house.

She cried -- and the judge wiped her tears with my checkbook.

For a while we pondered whether to take a vacation or get a divorce. We decided that a trip to Bermuda is over in two weeks, but a divorce is something you always have.

The difference between divorce and legal separation is that a legal separation gives a husband time to hide his money.

The happiest time of anyone's life is just after the first divorce.

You don't know a woman till you've met her in court.

Alimony, n. The ransom that the happy pay to the devil.

Whenever I date a guy, I think, "Is this the man I want my children to spend their weekends with?"

Passion, interest, or caprice, suggested daily motives for the dissolution of marriage; a word, a sign, a message, a letter, the mandate of a freedman, declared the separation; the most tender of human connections was degraded to a transient society of profit or pleasure.

[The] liberty of divorce does not contribute to happiness and virtue.

[The] liberty of divorce does not contribute to happiness and virtue. The facility of separation would destroy all mutual confidence, and inflame every trifling dispute . . .

Doctor

God heals, and the doctor takes the fees.

Our doctor would never really operate unless it was necessary. He was just that way. If he didn't need the money, he wouldn't lay a hand on you.

Doubt

If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin with doubts he shall end in certainties.

Dream

People who insist on telling their dreams are among the terrors of the breakfast table.

It does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to live.

Drinking And Drugs

They talk of my drinking but never my thirst.

You are not drunk if you can lie on the floor without holding on.

An Irish queer: a fellow who prefers women to drink.

The whole world is about three drinks behind.

The church is near but the road is icy; the bar is far away but I will walk carefully.

Uppers are no longer stylish, Methedrine is almost as rare as pure acid or DMT. "Consciousness Expansion" went out with LBJ and it is worth noting, historically, that downers came in with Nixon.

I have taken more good from alcohol than alcohol has taken from me.

A woman drove me to drink and I never even had the courtesy to thank her.

To cease smoking is the easiest thing I ever did. I ought to know because I've done it a thousand times.

"Mr. Churchill, you are drunk."
"Madame, you are ugly."
"Mr. Churchill, you are extremely drunk!"
"And you, Madame, are extremely ugly. But tomorrow, I shall be sober."

One reason I don't drink is that I want to known when I'm having a good time.

Actually, it only takes one drink to get me loaded. Trouble is, I can't remember if it's the thirteenth or the fourteenth.

I always keep a stimulant handy in case I see a snake -- which I also keep handy.

What contemptible scoundrel stole the cork from my lunch?

I don't drink. I don't like it. It makes me feel good.

I drink to forget I drink.

One more drink and I'll be under the host.

Drugs have taught an entire generation of American kids the metric system.

Reality is just a crutch for people who can't cope with drugs.

Cocaine is God's way of saying you're making too much money.

I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they've always worked for me.

Once, during Prohibition, I was forced to live for days on nothing but food and water.

A fool who, after plain warning, persists in dosing himself with dangerous drugs should be free to do so, for his death is a benefit to the race in general.

Not all men who drink are poets. Some of us drink because we aren't poets.

Drink and be merry, for our time on earth is short, and death lasts forever.

Bacchus hath drowned more men than Neptune.

Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut.

I envy people who drink. At least they have something to blame everything on.

[Brendan Behan was] too young to die, but too drunk to live.

I only take a drink on two occasions -- when I'm thirsty and when I'm not.

To alcohol! The cause of -- and solution to -- all of life's problems.

[One] must not demand prudence from a man who is never sober.

Duel

I thoroughly disapprove of duels. If a man should challenge me, I would take him kindly and forgivingly by the hand and lead him to a quiet place and kill him.

Duty

Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, "This was their finest hour."

Duties are not performed for duties' sake, but because their neglect would make the man uncomfortable. A man performs but one duty -- the duty of contenting his spirit, the duty of making himself agreeable to himself.

Do something every day that you don't want to do; this is the golden rule for acquiring the habit of doing your duty without pain.

Dying

The long habit of living indisposeth us for dying.

The dying man doesn't struggle much and he isn't much afraid. As his alkalies give out he succumbs to a blest stupidity. His mind fogs. His will power vanishes. He submits decently. He scarcely gives a damn.

Either that wallpaper goes, or I do.

Ear

What a blessing it would be if we could open and shut our ears as easily as we open and shut our eyes!

Earnestness

Earnestness is just stupidity sent to college.

Economics

The statesman, who should attempt to direct private people in what manner they ought to employ their capitals, would not only load himself with a most unnecessary attention, but assume an authority which could safely be trusted, not only to no single person, but to no council or senate whatever, and which would nowhere be so dangerous as in the hands of a man who had folly and presumption enough to fancy himself fit to exercise it.

No nation was ever ruined by trade.

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest.

There's no such thing as a free lunch.

The long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead.

Blockading squadrons are a means whereby nations seek to prevent their enemies from trading; protective tariffs are a means whereby nations attempt to prevent their own people from trading. What protectionism teaches us, is to do to ourselves in time of peace what enemies seek to do to us in time of war.

It is impossible to understand the history of economic thought if one does not pay attention to the fact that economics as such is a challenge to the conceit of those in power.

At least half of the popular fallacies about economics come from assuming that economic activity is a zero-sum game, in which what is gained by someone is lost by someone else. But transactions would not continue unless both sides gained, whether in international trade, employment, or renting an apartment.

[The] zero-sum caricature [applies] much more accurately to socialism, which stifles the creation of new wealth and thus fosters a dog-eat-dog struggle over existing material resources.

The active, insatiate principle of self-love can alone supply the arts of life and the wages of industry; and as soon as civil government and exclusive property have been introduced, they become necessary to the existence of the human race.

The economic miracle that has been the United States was not produced by socialized enterprises, by government union-industry cartels or by centralized economic planning. It was produced by private enterprises in a profit-and-loss system.

There is no such thing on this earth as something for nothing.

Economist

An economist is someone who sees something working in practice and wonders if it will work in theory.

Education

I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand.

"Whom are you?" he asked, for he had attended business college.

Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.

I find the three major administrative problems on a campus are sex for the students, athletics for the alumni and parking for the faculty.

Soap and education are not as sudden as a massacre, but they are more deadly in the long run.

It takes me several days, after I get back to Boston, to realize that the reference "the president" refers to the president of Harvard and not to a minor official in Washington.

I've over-educated myself in all the things I shouldn't have known at all.

I prefer the company of peasants because they have not been educated sufficiently to reason incorrectly

An intellectual is a man who takes more words than necessary to tell more than he knows.

A little learning is a dangerous thing;
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring.

The mediocre teacher tells. The good teacher explains. The superior teacher demonstrates. The great teacher inspires.

Those who can, do; those who can't, teach.

Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.

The learned are seldom pretty fellows, and in many cases their appearance tends to discourage a love of study in the young.

The trouble is not chiefly that our universities are unfit for students but that many present-day students are unfit for universities.

I was a modest, good-humored boy. It is Oxford that has made me insufferable.

. . . school teachers, taking them by and large, are probably the most ignorant and stupid class of men in the whole group of mental workers.

The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality.

More than any other class of blind leaders of the blind they are responsible for the degrading standardization which now afflicts the American people.

Children are educated by what the grown-up is and not by his talk.

I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.

Give your ears, hear the sayings,
Give your heart to understand them;
It profits to put them in your heart.

The power of instruction is seldom of much efficacy, except in those happy dispositions where it is almost superfluous.

It is better to learn late than never.

Personally I'm always ready to learn, although I do not always like being taught.

When you wish to instruct, be brief; that men's minds take in quickly what you say, learn its lesson, and retain it faithfully. Every word that is unnecessary only pours over the side of a brimming mind.

[It] is not sufficiently considered, that men more frequently require to be reminded than informed.

In the productions of the mind, as in those of the soil, the gifts of nature are excelled by industry and skill . . .

Genius may anticipate the season of maturity; but in the education of a people, as in that of an individual, memory must be exercised, before the powers of reason and fancy can be expanded: nor may the artist hope to equal or surpass, till he has learned to imitate, the works of his predecessors.

Education: that which reveals to the wise, and conceals from the stupid, the vast limits of their knowledge.

The idea of education has been so tied to schools, universities, and professors that many assume there is no other way, but education is available to anyone within reach of a library, a post office, or even a newsstand.

Egotist

An egotist is a man who thinks that if he hadn't been born, people would have wondered why.

Egotist, n. A person of low taste, more interested in himself than in me.

Election

Elections are won by men and women chiefly because most people vote against somebody rather than for somebody.

Emacs

Emacs is a nice [operating system], but a weird editor.

Empire

[An] extensive empire must be supported by a refined system of policy and oppression; in the centre, an absolute power, prompt in action and rich in resources; a swift and easy communication with the extreme parts; fortifications to check the first effort of rebellion; a regular administration to protect and punish; and a well-disciplined army to inspire fear, without provoking discontent and despair.

End

Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.

All lovely things will have an ending,
All lovely things will fade and die,
All youth, that's now so bravely spending,
Will beg a penny by and by.

Enemy

A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies.

Whoever has his foe at his mercy, and does not kill him, is his own enemy.

The enemy of my enemy is my friend.

He makes no friend who never made a foe.

We should forgive our enemies, but only after they have been hanged first.

Friends may come and go, but enemies accumulate.

The savage nations of the globe are the common enemies of civilized society; and we may inquire, with anxious curiosity, whether Europe is still threatened with a repetition of those calamities, which formerly oppressed the arms and institutions of Rome.

Yet this apparent security should not tempt us to forget, that new enemies, and unknown dangers, may possibly arise from some obscure people, scarcely visible in the map of the world. The Arabs or Saracens, who spread their conquests from India to Spain, had languished in poverty and contempt, till [Muhammad] breathed into those savage bodies the soul of enthusiasm.

Engineer

There are three principal ways to lose money: wine, women, and engineers. While the first two are more pleasant, the third is by far the more certain.

England

To eat well in England you should have breakfast three times a day.

If I should die, think only this of me:
That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is forever England.

Industrialization came to England but has since left.

English

The difference between the vanity of a Frenchman and an Englishman seems to be this: The one thinks everything right that is French, the other thinks everything wrong that is not English.

The English instinctively admire any man who has no talent and is modest about it.

An Englishman thinks he is moral when he is only uncomfortable.

If the King's English was good enough for Jesus, it's good enough for me!

The most dangerous thing in the world is to make a friend of an Englishman, because he'll come sleep in your closet rather than spend ten shillings on a hotel.

The English find ill-health not only interesting but respectable and often experience death in the effort to avoid a fuss.

Environment

People are easily anesthetized by overstatement, and there is a danger that the environmental movement will fall flat on its face when it is most needed, simply because it has pitched its tale too strongly.

Everybody wants to save the earth; nobody wants to help Mom do the dishes.

Worshiping the earth is more fun than going to church. It's also closer.

A pleasant natural environment is a good -- a luxury good, philosophical good, a moral goody-good, a good time for all. Whatever, we want it. If we want something, we should pay for it, with our labor or our cash. We shouldn't beg it, steal it, sit around wishing for it, or euchre the government into taking it by force.

[The land] was then covered with morasses and forests, which spread to a boundless extent, whenever man has ceased to exercise his dominion over the earth.

Envy

Pity is for the living, envy is for the dead.

Resentment kills a fool, and envy slays the simple.

[They] saw, they envied . . .

The covetous man is ever in want.

Epitaph

If, after I depart this vale, you ever remember me and have thought to please my ghost, forgive some sinner and wink your eye at some homely girl.

Pause, stranger, when you pass me by.
As you are now, so once was I.
As I am now, so you will be.
So prepare for death and follow me.

Equality

The Romans had aspired to be equal; they were leveled by the equality of servitude . . .

Error

The world always makes the assumption that the exposure of an error is identical with the discovery of the truth -- that error and truth are simply opposite. They are nothing of the sort. What the world turns to, when it has been cured of one error, is usually simply another error, and maybe one worse than the first one.

Where error is irretrievable, repentance is useless.

Europe

Europe is secure from any future irruptions of Barbarians; since, before they can conquer, they must cease to be barbarous.

When life becomes an extended picnic, with nothing of importance to do, ideas of greatness become an irritant. Such is the nature of the Europe syndrome.

In Europe, nothing is certain except death and welfare, and why let the former get in the way of the latter?

Example

Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example.

[Example] is the school of mankind, and they will learn at no other.

Experience

Experience is the worst teacher; it gives the test before presenting the lesson.

Experience is the name every one gives to their mistakes.

Face

A man's face is his autobiography. A woman's face is her work of fiction.

Fact

Everyone is entitled to his own opinion but not to his own facts.

Failure

Mistakes are often the stepping stones to utter failure.

In your code, never check for an error condition you don't know how to handle.

Show me a thoroughly satisfied man -- and I will show you a failure.

I cannot give you the formula for success, but I can give you the formula for failure -- which is: Try to please everybody.

The doctor can bury his mistakes, but an architect can only advise his clients to plant vines.

[After an appendectomy and a devastating electoral loss, Churchill found himself] without an office, without a seat, without a party, and without an appendix.

Experience, n. A series of failures. Every failure teaches a man something, to wit, that he will probably fail again next time.

Our achievements speak for themselves. What we have to keep track of are our failures, discouragements and doubts. We tend to forget the past difficulties, the many false starts, and the painful groping. We see our past achievements as the end results of a clean forward thrust, and our present difficulties as signs of decline and decay.

Three failures denote uncommon strength. A weakling has not enough grit to fail thrice.

The most basic of conservative principles is that if you reward bad behavior you get more of it.

Faith

Those of little faith are of little hatred.

Faithfulness

"Do you cheat on your wife?" asked the psychiatrist.

"Who else?" answered the patient.

"Before we get married," said the young woman to her fiance, "I want to confess some affairs that I've had in the past."

"But you told me all about those a few weeks ago," her young man replied.

"Yes, darling," she explained, "but that was a few weeks ago."

Fallacy

Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions.

Fame

Now when I bore people at a party, they think it's their fault.

In the future, everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes.

Fame may last a minute, but infamy lasts a lifetime.

Famine

African famine is not a visitation of fate. It is largely man-made, and the men who made it are largely Africans.

Fanatic

A fanatic is one who can't change his mind and won't change the subject.

Recluse fanatics have few ideas or sentiments to communicate . . .

Fanaticism

Goose pimples rose all over me, my hair stood on end, my eyes filled with tears of love and gratitude for this greatest of all conquerors of human misery and shame, and my breath came in little gasps. If I had not known that the Leader would have scorned such adulation, I might have fallen to my knees in unashamed worship, but instead I drew myself to attention, raised my arm in the eternal salute of the ancient Roman Legions and repeated the holy words, "Heil Hitler!"

Whenever the spirit of fanaticism, at once so credulous and so crafty, has insinuated itself into a noble mind, it insensibly corrodes the vital principles of virtue and veracity.

[Fanaticism] obliterates the feelings of humanity.

Fashion

Every generation laughs at the old fashions but religiously follows the new.

Art produces ugly things which frequently become beautiful with time. Fashion, on the other hand, produces beautiful things which always become ugly with time.

And by my grave you'd pray to have me back
So I could see how well you look in black.

Father

When asked why he did not become a father, Thales answered, "Because I am fond of children."

No man is responsible for his father. That was entirely his mother's affair.

Fault

If we had no faults we should not take so much pleasure in noting those of others.

Be to her virtues very kind. Be to her faults a little blind.

We confess our little faults to persuade people that we have no large ones.

Favor

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

Fear

I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

[It] was fear that was then making you a good citizen, which is never a lasting teacher of duty.

[The] sentiment of fear is nearly allied to that of hatred.

Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main sources of cruelty. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom.

No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.

Fence

Don't ever take a fence down until you know the reason it was put up.

Fighting

Never fight fair with a stranger, boy. You'll never get out of the jungle that way.

The man who strikes first admits that his ideas have given out.

We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.

Finality

It's over, and can't be helped, and that's one consolation, as they always say in Turkey, when they cut the wrong man's head off.

Flattery

'Tis an old maxim in the schools,
That flattery's the food of fools --
Yet now and then your men of wit
Will condescend to take a bit.

Flattery is a foolish suicide; she destroys herself with her own hands.

[Flattery] adheres to power, and envy to superior merit.

Folly

The follies which a man regrets most, in his life, are those which he didn't commit when had the opportunity.

Food

. . . nobody really likes capers no matter what you do with them. Some people pretend to like capers, but the truth is that any dish that tastes good with capers in it, tastes even better with capers not in it.

I am an epicure; you are a gourmand; he has both feet in the trough.

The best number for a dinner party is two -- myself and a damn good head waiter.

Oh, no doubt the cod is a splendid swimmer -- admirable for swimming purposes but not for eating.

I don't even butter my bread. I consider that cooking.

Fool

Let us be thankful for the fools. But for them the rest of us could not succeed.

It is hard to free fools from the chains they revere.

Hain't we got all the fools in town on our side? And ain't that a big enough majority for any town?

'Tis better to be silent and be thought a fool, than to speak and remove all doubt.

Who loves not wine, women, and song
Remains a fool his whole life long.

Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.

Never call a man a fool. Borrow from him.

The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly is to fill the world with fools.

Wise men store up knowledge,
but the mouth of a fool invites ruin.

A fool's lips bring him strife,
and his mouth invites a beating.

A learned fool is more foolish than an ignorant one.

Forecaster

The herd instinct among forecasters makes sheep look like independent thinkers.

Forgiveness

Injuries may be forgiven, but not forgotten.

Fortune

Fortune is fickle and soon asks back what he has given.

I never admired another's fortune so much that I became dissatisfied with my own.

The fortune of nations has often depended on accidents . . .

Free Speech

We forbid any course that says we restrict free speech.

The American people, I am convinced, really detest free speech. At the slightest alarm they are ready and eager to put it down.

Freedom

If people have to choose between freedom and sandwiches they will take sandwiches.

When the freedom they wished for most was the freedom from responsibility, then Athens ceased to be free and never was free again.

The middle class prefers comfort to pleasure, convenience to liberty, and a pleasant temperature to the deathly inner consuming fire.

There can be no real freedom without the freedom to fail.

A nation may lose its liberties in a day, and not miss them for a century.

The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground.

Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.

Be peaceful, be courteous, obey the law, respect everyone; but if someone puts his hand on you, send him to the cemetery.

I believe that the heaviest blow ever dealt at liberty's head will be dealt by [the United States] in the ultimate failure of its example to the earth.

Americans are so enamored of equality that they would rather be equal in slavery than unequal in freedom.

Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.

The average man doesn't want to be free. He wants to be safe.

It seems to me that society usually wins. There are, to be sure, free spirits in the world, but their freedom, in the last analysis, is not much greater than that of a canary in a cage. They may leap from perch to perch; they may bathe and guzzle at their will; they may flap their wings and sing. But they are still in the cage, and soon or late it conquers them.

We hear about constitutional rights, free speech and the free press. Every time I hear those words I say to myself, "That man is a Red, that man is a Communist." You never heard a real American talk in that manner.

If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, it expects what never was and never will be.

It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either of them.

The basic test of freedom is perhaps less in what we are free to do than in what we are free not to do.

To know what you prefer instead of humbly saying Amen to what the world tells you you ought to prefer, is to have kept your soul alive.

When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other.

[The] vain, inconstant, rebellious disposition of the people [of Armorica], was incompatible either with freedom or servitude.

[The] love of freedom, so often invigorated and disgraced by private ambition, was reduced, among the licentious Franks, to the contempt of order, and the desire of impunity.

Live free or die; death is not the worst of evils.

If you are not free to choose wrongly and irresponsibly, you are not free at all.

If [the fact that people make poor decisions] is reason enough for the government to second-guess their decisions about dangerous activities such as smoking cigarettes and riding motorcycles, why on earth should the government let people make their own choices when it comes to such consequential matters as where to live, how much education to get, whom to marry, whether to have children, which job to take, or what religion to practice?

Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.

The thing to remember about freedom is that it's not given, it's taken.

I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it.

Error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.

I am not a warrior, but who is? I have never learned to fight for my freedom. I was only good at enjoying it.

Freedom is the silence of the law.

I defy anybody to say what are the rights of a citizen, if they do not include the control of his own diet in relation to his own health.

French

The French have a passion for revolution but an abhorrence of change.

The French drink to get loosened up for an event, to celebrate an event, and even to recover from an event.

Friendship

Of my friends I am the only one I have left.

It's important to our friends to believe that we are unreservedly frank with them, and important to friendship that we are not.

In life it is difficult to say who do you the most mischief, enemies with the worst intentions, or friends with the best.

Don't tell your friends their social faults; they will cure the fault and never forgive you.

Do not use a hatchet to remove a fly from your friend's forehead.

Your friend is the man who knows all about you, and still likes you.

A man of active and resilient mind outwears his friendships just as certainly as he outwears his love affairs, his politics, and his epistemology.

A friend in need is a friend to be avoided.

Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies.

George Bernard Shaw: Am reserving two tickets for you for my premiere. Come and bring a friend -- if you have one.
Winston Churchill: Impossible to be present for the first performance. Will attend the second -- if there is one.

Frugality

He will always be a slave who does not know how to live upon a little.

Future

Do not boast about tomorrow,
for you do not know what a day may bring forth.

Gallo-Grecians

The emperor was probably born in the province of Galatia, whose inhabitants, the Gallo-Grecians, were supposed to unite the vices of a savage and a corrupted people.

Gambling

There are two times in a man's life when he should not speculate: when he can't afford it, and when he can.

Gauls

The Gauls were endowed with all the advantages of art and nature; but as they wanted courage to defend them, they were justly condemned to obey, and even to flatter, the victorious Barbarians, by whose clemency they held their precarious fortunes and their lives.

Genius

Every man of genius is considerably helped by being dead.

Talent is that which is in a man's power; genius is that in whose power a man is.

There is a thin line between genius and insanity. I have erased this line.

Sometimes men come by the name of genius in the same way that certain insects come by the name of centipede -- not because they have a hundred feet, but because most people can't count above fourteen.

I have nothing to declare except my genius.

Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.

The public is wonderfully tolerant. It forgives everything except genius.

Thousands of geniuses live and die undiscovered -- either by themselves or by others.

In the faculty of writing nonsense, stupidity is no match for genius.

The aspiring efforts of genius, or virtue, either in active or speculative life, are measured, not so much by their real elevation, as by the height to which they ascend above the level of their age and country; and the same stature, which in a people of giants would pass unnoticed, must appear conspicuous in a race of pygmies.

German

She had exactly the German way: whatever was in her mind to be delivered, whether a mere remark, or a sermon, or a cyclopedia, or the history of a war, she would get it into a single sentence or die. Whenever the literary German dives into a sentence, that is the last you are going to see of him till he emerges on the other side of the Atlantic with his verb in his mouth.

Germans

[The] ferocious Germans, who have so often attempted, and who will always desire, to exchange the solitude of their woods and morasses for the wealth and fertility of Gaul.

Girth

I had no intention of giving her my vital statistics. "Let me put it this way," I said. "According to my girth, I should be a ninety-foot redwood."

Glory

Glory is fleeting, but obscurity is forever.

True glory consists in doing what deserves to be written; in writing what deserves to be read; and in so living as to make the world happier for our living in it.

Goal

It is a paradoxical but profoundly true and important principle of life that the most likely way to reach a goal is to be aiming not at that goal itself but at some more ambitious goal beyond it.

God And Religion

During the past ten years I have stolen 75 Bibles, perhaps the national record.

Many of the insights of the saint stem from his experience as a sinner.

I am sending you out like sheep among wolves. Therefore be as shrewd as snakes and as innocent as doves.

God uses lust to impel men to marry, ambition to office, avarice to earning, and fear to faith. God led me like an old blind goat.

The worst that you can say about Him (God) is that basically He's an underachiever.

Creator -- A comedian whose audience is afraid to laugh.

God is really another artist. He invented the giraffe, the elephant and the cat. He has no real style. He just goes on trying other things.

Pray as though everything depended on the Lord and then go out and work as if it all depended on you.

I am prepared to meet my Maker. Whether my Maker is prepared for the great ordeal of meeting me is another matter.

Bart: How would I go about creating a half-man, half-monkey-type creature?
Teacher: I'm sorry, that would be playing God.
Bart: God, shmod, I want my monkey-man!

Doctors are busy playing God when so few of us have the qualifications. And besides, the job is taken.

Wherever God erects a house of prayer,
The Devil always builds a chapel there,
And 'twill be found upon examination,
The latter has the largest congregation.

God will forgive me, it is his business.

I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just.

It ain't those parts of the Bible that I can't understand that bother me, it is the parts that I do understand.

A Christian is a man who feels repentance on a Sunday for what he did on Saturday and is going to do on Monday.

There cannot be a God because, if there were one, I would not believe that I was not He.

When a pious visitor inquired sweetly, "Henry, have you made your peace with God?" [Thoreau] replied, "We have never quarreled."

Cursed is the one who trusts in man,
who depends on flesh for his strength
and whose heart turns away from the LORD.

I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.

Doubt isn't the opposite of faith; it is an element of faith.

There can be no surer sign of decay in a country than to see the rites of religion held in contempt.

It is conceivable that religion may be morally useful without being intellectually sustainable.

The saints are the sinners who keep on going.

The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting, it has been found difficult and left untried.

Archbishop, n. A Christian ecclesiastic of a rank superior to that attained by Christ.

God is the immemorial refuge of the incompetent, the helpless, the miserable. They find not only sanctuary in His arms, but also a kind of superiority, soothing to their macerated egos; He will set them above their betters.

The god I believe in isn't short of cash.

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

Christian, n. One who believes that the New Testament is a divinely inspired book admirably suited to the spiritual needs of his neighbor. One who follows the teachings of Christ in so far as they are not inconsistent with a life of sin.

Repentance, n. The faithful attendant and follower of Punishment. It is usually manifest in a degree of reformation that is not inconsistent with continuity of sin.

I believe that religion, generally speaking, has been a curse to mankind -- that its modest and greatly overestimated services on the ethical side have been more than overcome by the damage it has done to clear and honest thinking.

To attempt to be religious without practicing a specific religion is as possible as attempting to speak without a specific language.

All great religions, in order to escape absurdity, have to admit a dilution of agnosticism. It is only the savage, whether of the African bush or the American gospel tent, who pretends to know the will and intent of God exactly and completely.

There was never a century nor a country that was short of experts who knew the Deity's mind and were willing to reveal it.

Religious insanity is very common in the United States.

Man is certainly stark mad; he cannot make a worm, and yet he will be making gods by dozens.

The LORD is my rock, my fortress and my deliverer.

You are a forgiving God, gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and abounding in love.

Naked I came from my mother's womb,
and naked I will depart.
The LORD gave and the LORD has taken away;
may the name of the LORD be praised.

The fool says in his heart, "There is no God."

The heavens declare the glory of God;
the skies proclaim the work of his hands.

The LORD is my shepherd,
I shall not want.
He makes me lie down in green pastures;
He leads me beside quiet waters.
He restores my soul;
He guides me in the paths of righteousness
For His name's sake.

The LORD is my strength and my shield.

The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom.

The stone the builders rejected has become the capstone.

Blessed is he who comes in the name of the LORD.

Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light for my path.

As the rain and the snow
come down from heaven,
and do not return to it
without watering the earth
and making it bud and flourish,
so that it yields seed for the sower and bread for the eater,
so is my word that goes out from my mouth:
It will not return to me empty,
but will accomplish what I desire
and achieve the purpose for which I sent it.

"There is no peace," says my God, "for the wicked."

God grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change;
courage to change the things I can;
and wisdom to know the difference.

But to have avoided [all religious fads] has been one whirling adventure; and in my vision the heavenly chariot flies thundering through the ages, the dull heresies sprawling and prostrate, the wild truth reeling but erect.

Samuel Johnson enjoined the preachers of his time not to inveigh against those who were absent from church on Sundays by scolding those who were not absent.

Return to the LORD your God,
for he is gracious and compassionate,
slow to anger and abounding in love,
and he relents from sending calamity.

The gods help them that help themselves.

In religion and politics, people's beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second hand, and without examination.

Do not let your deeds belie your words, lest when you speak in church someone may say to himself, "Why do you not practice what you preach?"

The chief priests of the Jews protested to Pilate, "Do not write 'The King of the Jews,' but that this man claimed to be king of the Jews."

Pilate answered, "What I have written, I have written."

In the preceding volumes of this History, I have described the triumph of barbarism and religion . . .

[The] Christian clergy . . . has claimed, in every age, the privilege of dispensing honors, both on earth and in heaven.

"For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways," declares the LORD.

For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.

If God is for us, who can be against us?

Since ancient times no one has heard, no ear has perceived, no eye has seen any God besides you, who acts on behalf of those who wait for him.

It is mine to avenge; I will repay.

Be on your guard; stand firm in the faith; be men of courage; be strong.

God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.

All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.

I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith.

In the hands of a popular preacher, an earthquake is an engine of admirable effect.

For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith -- and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God -- not by works, so that no one can boast.

[Ennodius] adds weight to the narrative of Procopius, though we may doubt whether the devil actually contrived the siege of Pavia, to distress the bishop and his flock.

Six years [after Severinus's death], his body, which scattered miracles as it passed, was transported by his disciples into Italy.

[The Ascetics] seriously renounced the business, and the pleasures, of the age; abjured the use of wine, of flesh, and of marriage; chastised their body, mortified their affections, and embraced a life of misery, as the price of eternal happiness.

A sanguinary and covetous mind is not the symptom of a sincere conversion [to Christianity]: let [Clovis, King of the Franks,] show his faith by his works.

But as for me and my household, we will serve the LORD.

Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life.

The clergy successfully preached the doctrines of patience and pusillanimity . . .

[The] enthusiast who entered the dome of St. Sophia might be tempted to suppose that it was the residence, or even the workmanship, of the Deity. Yet how dull is the artifice, how insignificant is the labor, if it be compared with the formation of the vilest insect that crawls upon the surface of the temple!

The Gothic arms were less fatal to the schools of Athens than the establishment of a new religion, whose ministers superseded the exercise of reason, resolved every question by an article of faith, and condemned the infidel or skeptic to eternal flames.

[The Catholic church's] jurisdiction, wealth, and immunities, perhaps the most essential part of episcopal religion, were restored . . .

If a Christian power had been maintained in Arabia, [Muhammad] must have been crushed in his cradle, and Abyssinia would have prevented a revolution which has changed the civil and religious state of the world.

[And] the ambiguous word [of God], which contains the precept of Christ [concerning divorce], is flexible to any interpretation that the wisdom of a legislator can demand.

I know but of one religion in which the god and the victim [sacrifice] are the same.

Christmas is a time when people of all religions come together to worship Jesus Christ.

Justinian might have learned, "that religious controversy is the offspring of arrogance and folly; that true piety is most laudably expressed by silence and submission; that man, ignorant of his own nature, should not presume to scrutinize the nature of his God; and that it is sufficient for us to know, that power and benevolence are the perfect attributes of the Deity."

[Justinian] piously labored to establish with fire and sword the unity of the Christian faith.

[The] province which had been ruined by the bigotry of Justinian, was the same through which the [Muslims] penetrated into the empire.

The desire of gaining souls for God and subjects for the church, has excited in every age the diligence of the Christian priests.

[The Armenians] have often preferred the crown of martyrdom to the white turban of [Muhammad] . . .

If there is no God, everything is permitted.

Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.

[The] fond alliance of the monks and females obtained a final victory over the reason and authority of man.

[Muhammad], with the sword in one hand and the Koran in the other, erected his throne on the ruins of Christianity and of Rome.

The Koran divides the world into two parts: the House of Islam (the part of the world controlled by Muslims) and the House of War (that part not yet controlled by Muslims).

The most rational of the Arabs acknowledged [God's] power, though they neglected his worship . . .

The moral attributes of Jehovah may not easily be reconciled with the standard of human virtue . . .

A prophet may reveal the secrets of heaven and of futurity; but in his moral precepts he can only repeat the lessons of our own hearts.

[Muhammad] has not specified the male companions of the female elect, lest he should either alarm the jealousy of their former husbands, or disturb their felicity, by the suspicion of an everlasting marriage.

Ye Christian dogs, you know your option; the Koran, the tribute, or the sword. We are a people whose delight is in war, rather than in peace; and we despise your pitiful alms, since we shall be speedily masters of your wealth, your families, and your persons.

In the opinion of the [Saracens], the difference of religion is a reasonable ground of enmity and warfare.

[The Arabs'] rapacious spirit was approved and animated by the precepts of the Koran.

The successors of St. Peter appear to have followed, rather than guided, the impulse of manners and prejudice; without much foresight of the seasons, or cultivation of the soil, they gathered the ripe and spontaneous fruits of the superstition of the times.

Utopian desires are part of the human condition, and the craving to create a heaven on earth is the inevitable consequence of a godless society.

Golf

Golf is like a love affair: if you don't take it seriously, it's no fun; if you do take it seriously, it breaks your heart.

The only reason I ever played golf in the first place was so I could afford to hunt and fish.

Golf is a good walk spoiled.

You have to understand, I don't play golf for fun. It's my business. When the mailman starts delivering mail on his off day, that's when I'll start playing golf for the hell of it.

Good And Evil

It is a public scandal that gives offense and it is no sin to sin in secret.

The world is a dangerous place to live -- not because of the people who are evil but because of the people who don't do anything about it.

The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.

The word 'good' has many meanings. For example, if a man were to shoot his grandmother at a range of 500 yards, I should call him a good shot, but not necessarily a good man.

No good deed ever goes unpunished.

If I knew . . . that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my life.

No man deserves to be praised for his goodness unless he has the strength of character to be wicked. All other goodness is generally nothing but indolence or impotence of will.

My only policy is to profess evil and do good.

He who would do good to another must do it in minute particulars: general good is the plea of the scoundrel, hypocrite and flatterer. For art and science cannot exist but in minutely organized particulars.

If your morals make you dreary, depend on it they are wrong.

Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo.

One murder makes a villain, millions a hero.

Cruelties should be committed all at once.

The evil that is in the world almost always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence if they lack understanding.

The wicked man flees though no one pursues,
but the righteous are as bold as a lion.

Of course heaven forbids certain pleasures, but one finds means of compromise.

Our repentance is not so much regret for the ill we have done as fear of the ill that may happen to us in consequence.

Don't worry about avoiding temptation -- as you grow older, it starts avoiding you.

In spite of everything, I still believe that people are good at heart.

For what I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to do -- this I keep on doing.

Beware the fury of a patient man.

It is a sin to believe evil of others, but it is seldom a mistake.

Between two evils, I always pick the one I never tried before.

The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness.

I am in politics because of the conflict between good and evil, and I believe that in the end good will triumph.

To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he is doing is good . . .

Some people are worried about the difference between right and wrong. I'm worried about the difference between wrong and fun.

When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.

By the pricking of my thumbs, Something wicked this way comes.

Gossip

The eyes believe themselves; the ears believe other people.

Whoever gossips to you will gossip of you.

Some people will believe anything if you whisper it to them.

There is only one thing worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.

Gourmet

A gourmet is just a glutton with brains.

Government

A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.

I would rather be governed by the first three hundred names in the Boston telephone book than by the faculty of Harvard University.

The point to remember is that what the government gives it must first take away.

No man should be in public office who can't make more money in private life.

The best government is a benevolent tyranny tempered by an occasional assassination.

Be thankful we're not getting all the government we're paying for.

A government that is big enough to give you all you want is big enough to take it all away.

The state, it cannot too often be repeated, does nothing, and can give nothing, which it does not take from somebody

How can you govern a country with two hundred and forty-six varieties of cheese?

The supply of government exceeds the demand.

Every nation has the government it deserves.

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.

Society in every state is a blessing, but government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one.

In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed. They produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock.

The federal government has three duties. Print the money, deliver the mail, and declare war.

There is very little to admire in bureaucracy, but you have got to hand it to the Internal Revenue Service.

No class of Americans, so far as I know, has ever objected . . . to any amount of governmental meddling if it appeared to benefit that particular class.

Any doctrine that . . . weakens personal responsibility for judgment and for action . . . helps create the attitudes that welcome and support the totalitarian state.

Today's rebel is tomorrow's tyrant.

Politics is the gentle art of getting votes from the poor and campaign funds from the rich, by promising to protect each from the other.

Why should any country continue, forever, to be "great"?

That government is best which governs least, because its people discipline themselves.

The wrong sort of people are always in power because they would not be in power if they were not the wrong sort of people.

Nothing is easier than spending the public money. It does not appear to belong to anybody. The temptation is overwhelming to bestow it on somebody.

The office of President is such a bastardized thing, half royalty and half democracy, that nobody knows whether to genuflect or spit.

When I was a boy I was told that anybody could become President; I'm beginning to believe it.

I have been told I was on the road to hell, but I had no idea it was just a mile down the road with a Dome on it.

In all my years of public life I have never obstructed justice . . . Your President is no crook!

In America any boy may become President and I suppose it's just one of the risks he takes.

What our generation has forgotten is that the system of private property is the most important guaranty of freedom, not only for those who own property, but scarcely less for those who do not.

Who shall guard the guardians themselves? (quis custodiet ipsos custodes?)

It is much more secure to be feared than to be loved.

There is a homely adage which runs: "Speak softly and carry a big stick; you will go far."

Democracy, with its promise of international peace, has been no better guarantee against war than the old dynastic rule of kings.

There's no trick to being a humorist when you have the whole government working for you.

This island is almost made of coal and surrounded by fish. Only an organizing genius could produce a shortage of coal and fish in Great Britain at the same time.

The government solution to a problem is usually as bad as the problem.

I don't make jokes. I just watch the government and report the facts.

At a banquet Caligula was suddenly seized with a fit of helpless laughter. The consuls reclining next to him asked if they might share in the imperial merriment. Caligula, wiping the tears from his eyes, managed to gasp, "You'll never guess! It suddenly occurred to me that I had only to give a single nod, and both your throats would be cut on the spot."

The Labour Party Marxists see the consequences of their own folly all around them and call it the collapse of capitalism.

The task of weaning various people and groups from the national nipple will not be easy. The sound of whines, bawls, screams and invective will fill the air as the agony of withdrawal pangs finds voice.

Everybody has asked the question . . . "What shall we do with the Negro?" I have had but one answer from the beginning. Do nothing with us! Your doing with us has already played the mischief with us. Do nothing with us! If the apples will not remain on the tree of their own strength, if they are wormeaten at the core, if they are early ripe and disposed to fall, let them fall! I am not for tying or fastening them on the tree in any way, except by nature's plan, and if they will not stay there, let them fall. And if the Negro cannot stand on his own legs, let him fall also. All I ask is, give him a chance to stand on his own legs! Let him alone!

In all sorts of government man is made to believe himself free, and to be in chains.

[Government] is apprehended, not as a committee of citizens chosen to carry on the communal business of the whole population, but as a separate and autonomous corporation, mainly devoted to exploiting the population for the benefit of its own members.

When a private citizen is robbed, a worthy man is deprived of the fruits of his industry and thrift; when the government is robbed, the worst that happens is that certain rogues and loafers have less money to play with than they had before.

The natural tendency of every government is to grow steadily worse -- that is, to grow more satisfactory to those who constitute it and less satisfactory to those who support it.

I believe that all government is evil, in that all government must necessarily make war on liberty, and that the democratic government is at least as bad as any of the other forms.

The kind of man who wants the government to adopt and enforce his ideas is always the kind of man whose ideas are idiotic.

Government is like a baby. An alimentary canal with a big appetite at one end and no sense of responsibility at the other.

When the government fears the people, there is liberty. When the people fear the government, there is tyranny.

Were we directed from Washington when to sow and when to reap, we should soon want bread.

Individual rights are not subject to a public vote; a majority has no right to vote away the rights of a minority; the political function of rights is precisely to protect minorities from oppression by majorities (and the smallest minority on earth is the individual).

Only government can cause inflation, preserve monopoly, and punish enterprise.

You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.

The most valuable function performed by the federal government is entertainment.

The mystery of government is not how Washington works but how to make it stop.

[Government's modus operandi:] If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.

The urgent consideration of the public safety may undoubtedly authorize the violation of every positive law. How far that, or any other, consideration may operate to dissolve the natural obligations of humanity and justice, is a doctrine of which I still desire to remain ignorant.

He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance.

He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.

[We] hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.

He [is] the worst governor who [cannot] govern himself.

Governors ought to gain nothing by their governments but honor.

But the desire of obtaining the advantages, and of escaping the burdens, of political society, is a perpetual and inexhaustible source of discord.

[The one in authority] does not bear the sword for nothing.

[The] Roman government appeared every day less formidable to its enemies, more odious and oppressive to its subjects.

Government is not reason; it is not eloquence; it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master.

No man's life, liberty, or property are safe while the legislature is in session.

The whole idea of government is this: if enough people get together and act in concert, they can take something and not pay for it.

Government conspiracy? They can't even deliver our mail and it's got our address on it and everything!

Government subsidies can be critically analyzed according to a simple principle: You are smarter than the government, so when the government pays you to do something you wouldn't do on your own, it is almost always paying you to do something stupid.

For the people in government . . . Washington is an early-rising, hard-working city. It is a popular delusion that the government wastes vast amounts of money through inefficiency and sloth. Enormous effort and elaborate planning are required to waste this much money.

Bureaucrats want bigger bureaus. Special interests are interested in whatever [is] special to them. These two groups bring great pressure to bear upon politicians who have another agenda yet: to cater to the temporary whims and fads of the public and the press.

When a private entity does not produce the desired results, it [is] done away with. But a public entity gets bigger.

How small, of all that human hearts endure,
That part which laws or kings can cause or cure!

The people I distrust most are those who want to improve our lives but have only one course of action.

Expanded unemployment benefits . . . expand unemployment.

[East German's] were brought up to identify totally with the state; they may be slow to realize the extent to which they were victimized by the state.

The New Deal began, like the Salvation Army, by promising to save humanity. It ended, again like the Salvation Army, by running flop-houses and disturbing the peace.

Government doesn't solve problems; it subsidizes them.

Public spending expands to absorb all available tax revenues. . . . Public borrowing expands to absorb all available means of finance.

[The government is] now in a position to do what Franklin D. Roosevelt did during the Great Depression of the 1930s -- use a crisis of the times to create new institutions that will last for generations. To this day, we are still subsidizing millionaires in agriculture because farmers were having a tough time in the 1930s.

If man is not to do more harm than good in his efforts to improve the social order, he will have to learn that in this, as in all other fields where essential complexity of an organized kind prevails, he cannot acquire the full knowledge which would make mastery of the events possible. He will therefore have to use what knowledge he can achieve, not to shape the results as the craftsman shapes his handiwork, but rather to cultivate a growth by providing the appropriate environment, in the manner in which the gardener does this for his plants.

A little government and a little luck are necessary in life, but only a fool trusts either of them.

Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion.

Gratitude

He who receives a benefit should never forget it; he who bestow should never remember it.

The hardest arithmetic to master is that which enables us to count our blessings.

[Where] gratitude is felt, resentment can never be very far behind.

[The] act of gratitude is nowadays is probably more often neglected than overdone.

Greatness

A great ship asks deep water.

The world's great men have not commonly been great scholars, nor the great scholars great men.

The best things and best people rise out of their separateness; I'm against a homogenized society because I want the cream to rise.

Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat.

It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena; whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, and spends himself in a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows in the end the triumph of high achievement; and who, at worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.

Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.

Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them.

Grief

Grief is the agony of an instant, the indulgence of grief the blunder of a life.

Gun

You can go a long way with a smile. You can go a lot farther with a smile and a gun.

Gunpowder

If we contrast the rapid progress of this mischievous discovery [gunpowder] with the slow and laborious advances of reason, science, and the arts of peace, a philosopher, according to his temper, will laugh or weep at the folly of mankind.

Happiness

Men who are unhappy, like men who sleep badly, are always proud of the fact.

We are never so happy nor so unhappy as we imagine.

There is only one way to happiness and that is to cease worrying about things which are beyond the power of our will.

My life has no purpose, no direction, no aim, no meaning, and yet I'm happy. I can't figure it out. What am I doing right?

Happiness? That's nothing more than health and a poor memory.

It is not easy to find happiness in ourselves, and it is not possible to find it elsewhere.

Think of all the beauty still left around you and be happy.

Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

The conviction of the rich that the poor are happy is no more foolish than the conviction of the poor that the rich are.

The only really happy folk are married women and single men.

He's turned his life around. He used to be depressed and miserable. Now he's miserable and depressed.

Noble deeds and hot baths are the best cures for depression.

A lifetime of happiness! No man alive could bear it; it would be hell on earth.

When I was young, I used to think that wealth and power would bring me happiness . . . I was right.

Hollywood is where, if you don't have happiness, you send out for it.

Boethius might have been styled happy, if that precarious epithet could be safely applied before the last term of the life of man.

There is no device whatever to be invented for securing happiness without industry, economy, and virtue.

If there were in the world today any large number of people who desired their own happiness more than they desired the unhappiness of others, we could have paradise in a few years.

The good life, as I conceive it, is a happy life. I do not mean that if you are good you will be happy - I mean that if you are happy you will be good.

Haste

Haste is of the devil. Slowness is of God.

Hatred

Passionate hatred can give meaning and purpose to an empty life.

Health

Nature, time and patience are the three great physicians.

If a man thinks about his physical or moral state, he nearly always discovers that he is ill.

A vigorous five-mile walk will do more good for an unhappy but otherwise healthy adult than all the medicine and psychology in the world.

What some call health, if purchased by perpetual anxiety about diet, isn't much better than tedious disease.

I'm not sick, but I'm not well.

Use your health, even to the point of wearing it out. That is what it is for. Spend all you have before you die; and do not outlive yourself.

Nearly all men die of their medicines, and not of their illnesses.

"Good health" is merely the slowest rate at which one can die.

Leave the table hungry.
Leave the bed sleepy.
Leave the table thirsty.

Be not slow to visit the sick.

Preserving health by too severe a rule is a worrisome malady.

Health is not simply the absence of sickness.

It's no longer a question of staying healthy. It's a question of finding a sickness you like.

Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint.

Health nuts are going to feel stupid someday, lying in hospitals dying of nothing.

Quit worrying about your health. It'll go away.

Heart

There is only one quality worse than hardness of heart and that is softness of head.

The head never rules the heart, but just becomes its partner in crime.

As the arteries grow hard, the heart grows soft.

Each heart knows its own bitterness,
and no one else can share its joy.

Even in laughter the heart may ache,
and joy may end in grief.

Let not your heart be troubled . . .

Heaven And Hell

Heaven for climate, hell for company.

Everyone who has ever built anywhere a "new heaven" first found the power thereto in his own hell.

Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven.

What shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?

Heaven goes by favour. If it went by merit, you would stay out and your dog would go in.

May you get to Heaven a half hour before the Devil knows you're dead.

It is Hell, of course, that makes priests powerful, not Heaven, for after thousands of years of so-called civilization fear remains the one common denominator of mankind.

Cerberus, n. The watch-dog of Hades, whose duty it was to guard the entrance -- against whom or what does not clearly appear; everybody, sooner or later, had to go there, and nobody wanted to carry off the entrance.

The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose.

Who finds heaven on earth will end in hell.

According to the faith and mercy of his Christian enemies, [Chosroes] sunk without hope into a still deeper abyss [Hell]; and it will not be denied, that tyrants of every age and sect are the best entitled to such infernal abodes.

Hero

We can't all be heroes because someone has to sit on the curb and clap as they go by.

But heroes are not reckless or foolhardy. . . . A sensible hero fights bravely when he needs to do so; but first he fights prudently in order to avoid fighting bravely.

Historian

The revolution of ages may bring round the same calamities; but ages may revolve without producing a Tacitus to describe them.

History

Don't brood on what's past, but never forget it either.

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

History, n. An account, mostly false, of events, mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers, mostly knaves, and soldiers, mostly fools.

History . . . is indeed little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.

[The] Holy Roman Empire was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire . . .

History's lessons are no more enlightening than the wisdom of those who interpret them.

The study of history is a powerful antidote to contemporary arrogance. It is humbling to discover how many of our glib assumptions, which seem to us novel and plausible, have been tested before, not once but many times and in innumerable guises; and discovered to be, at great human cost, wholly false.

Anybody can make history. Only a great man can write it.

One of the lessons of history is that nothing is often a good thing to do and always a clever thing to say. [emphasis added]

The voice of history [is] often little more than the organ of hatred or flattery.

History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.

The interpretation of history is forever in flux, as much reflection of the present as window on the past.

From the paths of blood (and such is the history of nations) I cannot refuse to turn aside to gather some flowers of science or virtue.

So obscure are the greatest events, as some take for granted any hearsay, whatever its source, others turn truth into falsehood, and both errors find encouragement with posterity.

[We should] suspend our belief of every tale that deviates from the laws of nature and the character of man.

Holocaust

Better than the rest of us, they [the Jews] sensed what was ahead for their people.

Honor

After I am dead, I would rather have men ask why Cato has no monument than why he has one.

It is better to be hated for what you are than loved for what you are not.

It is better to deserve honors and not have them than to have them and not to deserve them.

It was no longer esteemed infamous for a Roman to survive his honor and independence.

And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.

Honor is like an island, rugged and without a beach; once we have left it, we can never return.

Hope

He had that rare weird electricity about him -- that extremely wild and heavy presence that you only see in a person who has abandoned all hope of ever behaving "normally."

Never deprive someone of hope; it might be all they have.

Humanitarianism

When any man is more stupidly vain and outrageously egotistic than his fellows, he will hide his hideousness in humanitarianism.

Humility

Shamus, n. [Yiddish]: A shamus is a guy who takes care of handyman tasks around the temple, and makes sure everything is in working order. A shamus is at the bottom of the pecking order of synagogue functionaries, and there's a joke about that: A rabbi, to show his humility before God, cries out in the middle of a service, "Oh, Lord, I am nobody!" The cantor, not to be bested, also cries out, "Oh, Lord, I am nobody!" The shamus, deeply moved, follows suit and cries, "Oh, Lord, I am nobody!" The rabbi turns to the cantor and says, "Look who thinks he's nobody!"

Humor

Everything is funny as long as it is happening to somebody else.

Look at Jewish history. Unrelieved lamenting would be intolerable. So, for every ten Jews beating their breasts, God designated one to be crazy and amuse the breast-beaters. By the time I was five I knew I was that one.

Humour can be dissected, as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process.

Humour is an affirmation of dignity, a declaration of man's superiority to all that befalls him.

The secret source of Humor itself is not joy but sorrow. There is no humor in heaven.

Comedy, like sodomy, is an unnatural act.

There is no reason why a joke should not be appreciated more than once. Imagine how little good music there would be if, for example, a conductor refused to play Beethoven's Fifth Symphony on the ground that his audience might have heard it before.

Hunter S. Thompson

Thompson, if he is to be believed, has sampled the entire rainbow of legal and illegal drugs in heroic efforts to feel better than he does.

As for the truth about his health: I have asked around about it. I am told that he appears to be strong and rosy, and steadily sane. But we will be doing what he wants us to do, I think, if we consider his exterior a sort of Dorian Gray facade. Inwardly, he is being eaten alive by tinhorn politicians.

The disease is fatal. There is no known cure. The most we can do for the poor devil, it seems to me, is to name his disease in his honor. From this moment on, let all those who feel that Americans can be as easily led to beauty as to ugliness, to truth as to public relations, to joy as to bitterness, be said to be suffering from Hunter Thompson's disease. I don't have it this morning. It comes and goes. This morning I don't have Hunter Thompson's disease.

Idea

If you happen to be one of the fretful minority who can do creative work, never force an idea; you'll abort it if you do. Be patient and you'll give birth to it when the time is ripe. Learn to wait.

The best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas.

I think and think for months and years. Ninety-nine times, the conclusion is false. The hundredth time I am right.

Society's course will be changed only by a change in ideas. First you must reach the intellectuals, the teachers and writers, with reasoned argument. It will be their influence on society which will prevail, and the politicians will follow.

The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.

It is ideas, not vested interests, which are dangerous for good or evil.

Lack of money is no obstacle. Lack of an idea is an obstacle.

The communication of ideas requires a similitude of thought and language . . .

Great ideas often look identical to stupid ones right up until the moment they work.

The best way to get a good idea is to get lots of ideas.

Idealist

The great crimes of the twentieth century were committed not by money-grubbing capitalists but by dedicated idealists. Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler were contemptuous of money. The passage from the nineteenth to the twentieth century has been a passage from considerations of money to considerations of power. How naive the cliche that money is the root of evil!

Identity

I always wanted to be somebody. I should have been more specific.

Idiot

Nothing is more humiliating than to see idiots succeed in enterprises we have failed in.

There's nothing more dangerous than a resourceful idiot.

Idleness

An idle mind is the devil's workshop.

Be not solitary, be not idle.

Imagination

Sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.

Imagination is more important than knowledge.

Imitation

It is by imitation, far more than by precept, that we learn everything; and what we learn thus, we acquire not only more efficiently, but more pleasantly. This forms our manners, our opinions, our lives.

Immortality

I don't want to achieve immortality through my work . . . I want to achieve it through not dying.

Imperialism

[It] is impossible to reduce, or, at least, to hold a distant country against the wishes and efforts of its inhabitants.

Take up the White Man's burden--
The savage wars of peace--
Fill full the mouth of Famine
And bid the sickness cease;
And when your goal is nearest
The end for others sought,
Watch Sloth and heathen Folly
Bring all your hope to nought.

There is nothing perhaps more adverse to nature and reason than to hold in obedience remote countries and foreign nations, in opposition to their inclination and interest.

Impotence

Anxiety, n. The first time you can't do it a second time.

Panic, n. The second time you can't do it the first time.

"Has it ever occurred to you that in your promiscuous pursuit of women you are merely trying to assuage your subconscious fears of sexual impotence?"

"Yes, sir, it has."

"Then why do you do it?"

"To assuage my fears of sexual impotence."

Improvidence

[The Goths'] poverty was incurable; since the most liberal donatives were soon dissipated in wasteful luxury, and the most fertile estates became barren in their hands . . .

Incompetence

[Laurence J. Peter] has devoted his life to discovering remedies for incompetence . . .

Index

If you don't find it in the Index, look very carefully through the entire catalogue.

India

India is a geographical term. It is no more a united nation than the Equator.

Indifference

I regard you with an indifference closely bordering on aversion.

Inequality

The worst form of inequality is to try to make unequal things equal.

Inflation

Inflation is one form of taxation that can be imposed without legislation.

Instruction

A mind without instruction can no more bear fruit than can a field, however fertile, without cultivation.

Intelligence

Intelligence has much less practical application than you'd think.

The intelligent man finds almost everything ridiculous, the sensible man hardly anything.

Interface

The only intuitive interface is the nipple. After that, it's all learned.

Internet

If the Library of Alexandria was the emblem of our ambition of omniscience, the Web is the emblem of our ambition of omnipresence; the library that contained everything has become the library that contains anything.

Interruption

Don't interrupt me when I'm interrupting!

Investment

Be fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful.

Irish

The Irish people do not gladly suffer common sense.

We Irish are too poetical to be poets; we are a nation of brilliant failures, but we are the greatest talkers since the Greeks.

Joy

Grief can take care of itself, but to get the full value of a joy you must have somebody to divide it with.

Judgment

We are all inclined to judge ourselves by our ideals; others by their acts.

Justice

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

Whether we bring our enemies to justice, or bring justice to our enemies, justice will be done.

Kindness

I expect to pass through this world but once. Any good therefore that I can do, or any kindness that I can show to my fellow-creature, let me do it now. Let me not defer or neglect it, for I shall not pass this way again.

One kind word can warm three winter months.

Wise sayings often fall on barren ground; but a kind word is never thrown away.

King

It is not a sign of arrogance for the king to rule. That is what he is there for.

Knowledge And Ignorance

If you don't know how to pronounce a word, say it loud! Why compound ignorance with inaudibility?

All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence, and then success is sure.

Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before. He is full of murderous resentment of people who are ignorant without having come by their ignorance the hard way.

The first step to knowledge is to know that we are ignorant.

Try to know everything of something, and something of everything.

Tain't what a man don't know that hurts him; it's what he knows that just ain't so!

As soon as any man says of the affairs of state, What does it matter to me? the state may be given up as lost.

The recipe for perpetual ignorance is: be satisfied with your opinions and content with your knowledge.

You know everybody is ignorant, only on different subjects.

I was gratified to be able to answer promptly. I said I don't know.

Not to know what has been transacted in former times is to be always a child. If no use is made of the labors of past ages, the world must remain always in the infancy of knowledge.

You can know the name of a bird in all the languages of the world, but when you're finished, you'll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird . . . So let's look at the bird and see what it's doing -- that's what counts. I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.

Not being a liberal, I have very little grasp of things that I know nothing about.

Learned foolishness, is more egregiously foolish than the folly of ignorance. It is wayward, positive, and imperious; too conceited and indocile to be informed, and too obstinate to forsake error.

I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how to do it.

Nothing is worse than active ignorance.

I do not know myself, and God forbid that I should.

I find that a great part of the information I have was acquired by looking up something and finding something else on the way.

And it's a necessity [for journalists] to pretend to be competent on every subject, some of which they really do not understand. They are under that necessity, I regret; I'm sorry for them. But to pretend to understand all the things you write about, and habitually to write about things you do not understand, is a very corrupting thing.

Language

But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.

I am always sorry when any language is lost, because languages are the pedigree of nations.

Language [is] the leading principle which unites or separates the tribes of mankind . . .

[Greek is] doubtless the most perfect [language] that has been contrived by the art of man.

Ignorant people think it is the noise which fighting cats make that is so aggravating, but it ain't so; it is the sickening grammar that they use.

The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.

[Greek is] a musical and prolific language, that gives a soul to the objects of sense, and a body to the abstractions of philosophy.

Laughter

But let me laugh awhile, I've mickle time to grieve.

Life does not cease to be funny when people die, any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh.

I was irrevocably betrothed to laughter, the sound of which has always seemed to me to be the most civilised music in the world.

Law

When I came back to Dublin I was court-martialed in my absence and sentenced to death in my absence, so I said they could shoot me in by absence.

Justice delayed is justice denied.

This is a court of law, young man, not a court of justice.

Courtroom, n. A place where Jesus Christ and Judas Iscariot would be equals, with betting odds in favor of Judas.

The people can change Congress but only God can change the Supreme Court.

The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws.

A jury consists of twelve persons chosen to decide who has the better lawyer.

. . . mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent . . .

I am further of opinion that it would be better for us to have [no laws] at all than to have them in so prodigious numbers as we have.

It is emphatically the province and duty of the Judiciary to say what the law is, not what the law should be.

[Whenever] the offense inspires less horror than the punishment, the rigor of penal law is obliged to give way to the common feelings of mankind.

[The] operation of the wisest laws is imperfect and precarious. They seldom inspire virtue, they cannot always restrain vice.

There is hardly a political question in the United States which does not sooner or later turn into a judicial one.

But the wisdom and authority of the legislator are seldom victorious in a contest with the vigilant dexterity of private interest.

Laws are like sausages. It's better not to see them being made.

[It] is the interest as well as duty of a sovereign to maintain the authority of the laws.

One of the greatest delusions in the world is the hope that the evils in this world are to be cured by legislation.

A Locrian, who proposed any new law, stood forth in the assembly of the people with a cord round his neck, and if the law was rejected, the innovator was instantly strangled.

A jurisdiction thus vague and arbitrary was exposed to the most dangerous abuse: the substance, as well as the form, of justice were often sacrificed to the prejudices of virtue, the bias of laudable affection, and the grosser seductions of interest or resentment.

With the utmost deference for these excellent civilians, I cannot but consider this confusion of the judicial and legislative authority as a very perilous constitutional precedent.

The science of the laws is the slow growth of time and experience . . .

The books of jurisprudence were interesting to few, and entertaining to none: their value was connected with present use, and they sunk forever as soon as that use was superseded by the innovations of fashion, superior merit, or public authority.

Whatever is secret must be doubtful, and our natural horror of vice may be abused as an engine of tyranny.

A sentence of death and infamy was often founded on the slight and suspicious evidence of a child or a servant: the guilt [of the defendant] was presumed by the judges [due to the nature of the charge], and paederasty became the crime of those to whom no crime could be imputed.

[The] discretion of the judge is the first engine of tyranny . . .

But a law, however venerable be the sanction, cannot suddenly transform the temper of the times . . .

[A] thousand quarrels must arise under a law, and among men, whose sole umpire [is] the sword.

Government can easily exist without laws, but law cannot exist without government.

Lawyer

No poet ever interpreted nature as freely as a lawyer interprets truth.

I don't want a lawyer to tell me what I cannot do; I hire him to tell me how to do what I want to do.

Every Federal Judge is a lawyer. So are most Congressmen. Every invasion of the plain rights of the citizen has a lawyer behind it. If all lawyers were hanged tomorrow, and their bones sold to a mahjong factory, we'd all be freer and safer, and our taxes would be reduced by half.

A countryman between two lawyers is like a fish between two cats.

Laziness

A little sleep, a little slumber,
a little folding of the hands to rest --
and poverty will come on you like a bandit
and scarcity like an armed man.

Lazy hands make a man poor,
but diligent hands bring wealth.

That indolent but agreeable condition of doing nothing.

Leader

All leaders strive to turn their followers into children.

Leadership

It is hard to look up to a leader who keeps his ear to the ground.

It is frequently a misfortune to have very brilliant men in charge of affairs; they expect too much of ordinary men.

There go my people. I must find out where they are going so I can lead them.

He who thinks he leads, and has no one following him is only taking a walk.

"Cheshire-Puss," she began, "would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?"
"That depends a good deal on where you want to get to," said the Cat.
"I don't care much where--" said Alice.
"Then it doesn't matter which way you go," said the Cat.

When I want to know what France thinks, I ask myself.

I must follow them. I am their leader.

You have lost a useful commander, and you have made a very wretched emperor.

Legacy

Men's evil manners live in brass; their virtues we write in water.

Legislator

It has been sagaciously conjectured, that the artful legislator indulged the stubborn prejudices of his countrymen.

Liar

The liar at any rate recognizes that recreation, not instruction, is the aim of conversation, and is a far more civilised being than the blockhead who loudly expresses his disbelief in a story which is told simply for the amusement of the company.

Liberty

They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.

The effect of liberty to individuals is, that they may do what they please; we ought to see what it will please them to do, before we risk congratulations.

The Americans combine the notions of Christianity and of liberty so intimately in their minds, that it is impossible to make them conceive the one without the other.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

There can be no liberty unless there is economic liberty.

There's only one basic human right, the right to do as you damn well please. And with it comes the only basic human duty, the duty to take the consequences.

You need only reflect that one of the best ways to get yourself a reputation as a dangerous citizen these days is to go about repeating the very phrases which our founding fathers used in the struggle for independence.

It is in the township that the strength of free peoples resides. Municipal institutions are for liberty what primary schools are for science; they place it within reach of the people. . . . Without municipal institutions, a nation is able to give itself a free government, but it lacks the spirit of liberty.

The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.

Libius Severus

History has scarcely deigned to notice [Libius Severus's] birth, his elevation, his character, or his death.

Life

A man said to the Universe, "Sir, I exist!"

"However," replied the Universe, "the fact has not created in me a sense of obligation."

The basic fact about human existence is not that it is a tragedy, but that it is a bore.

Men fear silence as they fear solitude, because both give them a glimpse of the terror of life's nothingness.

[The Forgotten Man] is the clean, quiet, virtuous domestic citizen who pays his debts and his taxes and is never heard of out of his little circle. . . . [He] works and votes -- generally he prays -- but his chief business in life is to pay.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I --
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

There are two ways to slide easily through life: to believe everything or to doubt everything; both ways save us from thinking.

Let us endeavor so to live that when we come to die even the undertaker is sorry.

Life is what happens to us while we are making other plans.

I advise you to go on living solely to enrage those who are paying your annuities. It is the only pleasure I have left.

The first half of our life is ruined by our parents and the second half by our children.

The game of life is not so much in holding a good hand as playing a poor hand well.

What the meaning of human life may be I don't know; I incline to suspect that it has none.

Do not take life too seriously. You will never get out of it alive.

Do not despair of life. You have no doubt force enough to overcome your obstacles. Think of the fox prowling through wood and field in a winter night for something to satisfy his hunger. Notwithstanding cold and hounds and traps, his race survives. I do not believe any of them ever committed suicide.

If you only have a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.

It is not doing the thing we like to do, but liking the thing we have to do, that makes life blessed.

And remember, no matter where you go, there you are.

What does not destroy me, makes me stronger.

In this world there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants and the other is getting it.

Never abandon life. There is a way out of everything except death.

Fancy living in one of these streets, never seeing anything beautiful, never eating anything savoury, never saying anything clever!

We are born crying, live complaining, and die disappointed.

The act of self-denial seems to confer on us the right to be harsh and merciless toward others.

Men of thought seldom work well together, whereas between men of action there is usually an easy camaraderie.

How little can we foresee the consequences either of wise or unwise action, of virtue or of malice! Without this measureless and perpetual uncertainty the drama of human life would be destroyed.

. . . men work simply in order to escape the depressing agony of contemplating life -- that their work, like their play, is a mumbo-jumbo that serves them by permitting them to escape from reality.

Life may not be exactly pleasant, but it is at least not dull. Heave yourself into Hell today, and you may miss, tomorrow or next day, another Scopes trial, or another War to End War, or perchance a rich and buxom widow with all her first husband's clothes. There are always more Hardings hatching. I advocate hanging on as long as possible.

Life is short, but death lasts forever.

How little it takes to make life unbearable. . . . A pebble in the shoe, a cockroach in the spaghetti, a woman's laugh.

The world is a stage, but the play is badly cast.

Life is a hideous thing.

At the door of life, by the gate of breath,
There are worse things waiting for men than death.

Don't go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first.

When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained.

When you have got an elephant by the hind leg, and he is trying to run away, it's best to let him run.

Birds sing after a storm; why shouldn't people feel as free to delight in whatever sunlight remains to them?

I value kindness to human beings first of all, and kindness to animals. I don't respect the law; I have a total irreverence for anything connected with society except that which makes the roads safer, the beer stronger, the food cheaper, and old men and women warmer in the winter, and happier in the summer.

Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.

I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.

Life is a long lesson in humility.

Be master of your petty annoyances and conserve your energies for the big, worthwhile things. It isn't the mountain ahead that wears you out -- it's the grain of sand in your shoe.

A bad habit never disappears miraculously; it's an undo-it-yourself project.

Why shouldn't things be largely absurd, futile, and transitory? They are so, and we are so, and they and we go very well together.

Music is essentially useless, as life is.

If I had to live my life again, I'd make the same mistakes, only sooner.

In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on.

I think you should live your life so that the maximum number of people will attend your funeral.

Listening

No one really listens to anyone else, and if you try it for a while you'll see why.

A good listener is not only popular everywhere, but after a while he gets to know something.

Literature

When I read Shakespeare I am struck with wonder
That such trivial people should muse and thunder
In such a lovely language.

The cruelest thing that has happened to Lincoln since he was shot by Booth was to fall into the hands of Carl Sandburg.

H. L. Mencken suffers from the hallucination that he is H. L. Mencken -- there is no cure for a disease of that magnitude.

Nobody can read Freud without realizing that he was the scientific equivalent of another nuisance, George Bernard Shaw.

The trouble with the publishing business is that too many people who have half a mind to write a book do so.

No author is a man of genius to his publisher.

I often quote myself. It adds spice to my conversation.

When a thing has been said and well said, have no scruple; take it and copy it.

I suppose every old scholar has had the experience of reading something in a book which was significant to him, but which he could never find again. Sure he is that he read it there, but no one else ever read it, nor can he find it again, though he buy the book and ransack every page.

The tools I need for my trade are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whiskey.

I never desire to converse with a man who has written more than he has read.

Rock journalism is people who can't write interviewing people who can't talk for people who can't read.

When told not to end a sentence with a preposition, Churchill replied, "This is nonsense up with which I will not put."

A classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.

I hate vulgar realism in literature. The man who would call a spade a spade should be compelled to use one. It is the only thing he is fit for.

Cut out all those exclamation marks. An exclamation mark is like laughing at your own joke.

I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again.

He that I am reading seems always to have the most force.

Logic

The Greeks invented logic but were not fooled by it.

Love

People who throw kisses are hopelessly lazy.

The greater love is a mother's; then comes a dog's; then a sweetheart's.

It has been wisely said that we cannot really love anybody at whom we never laugh.

If I'm such a legend, then why am I so lonely? Let me tell you, legends are all very well if you've got somebody around who loves you.

The wise want love; and those who love want wisdom.

Many a man has fallen in love with a girl in a light so dim he would not have chosen a suit by it.

Let there be spaces in your Togetherness.

I never loved another person the way I loved myself.

As soon as you cannot keep anything from a woman, you love her.

Those who are faithful know only the trivial side of love: it is the faithless who know love's tragedies.

Love is like war: easy to begin but very hard to stop.

The quarrels of lovers are the renewal of love.

The great secret of happiness in love is to be glad that the other fellow married her.

Love and eggs are best when they are fresh.

The most disgusting cad in the world is the man who, on grounds of decorum and morality, avoids the game of love. He is one who puts his own ease and security above the most laudable of philanthropies.

A man always remembers his first love with special tenderness. But after that he begins to bunch them.

To love oneself is the beginning of a life-long romance.

There is always something ridiculous about the emotions of people whom one has ceased to love.

Love is the wisdom of the fool and the folly of the wise.

It is easier to love humanity as a whole that to love one's neighbor.

Love is an act of endless forgiveness, a tender look which becomes a habit.

And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.

Of all forms of caution, caution in love is perhaps the most fatal to true happiness.

Lover

"You are the greatest lover I have ever had."

"Well, I practice a lot when I'm alone."

I sighed as a lover, I obeyed as a son.

Madness

There's a pinch of the madman in every great man.

I suppose it is much more comfortable to be mad and not know it, than to be sane and have one's doubts.

[Imagination] does not breed insanity. Exactly what does breed insanity is reason. Poets do not go mad; but chess players do. Mathematicians go mad . . . but creative artists very seldom.

Majorian

[Majorian] presents the welcome discovery of a great and heroic character, such as sometimes arise, in a degenerate age, to vindicate the honor of the human species.

Man

Limited in his nature, infinite in his desires, man is a fallen god who remembers heaven.

That man is an aggressive creature will hardly be disputed. With the exception of certain rodents, no other vertebrate habitually destroys members of its own species.

God must love the common man, he made so many of them.

Man is the only animal that blushes. Or needs to.

Man is a beautiful machine that works very badly.

Man can believe the impossible, but man can never believe the improbable.

Such is the human race. Often it does seem such a pity that Noah and his party did not miss the boat.

Every man is as God made him, ay, and often worse.

Man differs from the animal only by a little; most men throw that little away.

Man born of woman
is of few days and full of trouble.
He springs up like a flower and withers away;
like a fleeting shadow, he does not endure.

If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and a man.

I know in my heart that man is good.
That what is right will always eventually triumph.
And there's purpose and worth to each and every life.

Men are not against you; they are merely for themselves.

Man has much more to fear from the passions of his fellow-creatures, than from the convulsions of the elements.

Neither conservatives nor humorists believe man is good. But left-wingers do.

In this primitive and abject state [of hunters and gatherers], which ill deserves the name of society, the human brute, without arts or laws, almost without sense or language, is poorly distinguished from the rest of the animal creation.

For this is the tragedy of man -- circumstances change, but he does not.

If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience.

[But] the man who dares not expose his life in the defence of his children and his property, has lost in society the first and most active energies of nature.

It has been said that man is a rational animal. All my life I have been searching for evidence which could support this.

Mankind

Whatever you may be sure of, be sure of this -- that you are dreadfully like other people.

History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives.

Most human beings have an absolute and infinite capacity for taking things for granted.

We should expect the best and the worst from mankind, as from the weather.

One of the laws of paleontology is that an animal which must protect itself with thick armour is degenerate. It is usually a sign that the species is on the road to extinction.

Barring that natural expression of villainy which we all have, the man looked honest enough.

To have doubted one's own first principles is the mark of a civilized man.

The fall of man stands a lie before Beethoven, a truth before Hitler.

When a man is wrapped up in himself, he makes a pretty small package.

Cursed is every one who places his hope in man.

[The] vain and transitory scenes of human greatness are unworthy of a serious thought.

Manners

Dear Miss Manners: Please list some tactful ways of removing a man's saliva from your face.
Gentle Reader: Please list some decent ways of acquiring a man's saliva on your face . . .

Moving parts in rubbing contact require lubrication to avoid excessive wear. Honorifics and formal politeness provide the lubrication where people rub together. Often the very young, the untraveled, the naive, the unsophisticated deplore these formalities as "empty," "meaningless," or "dishonest," and scorn to use them. No matter how "pure" their motives, they thereby throw sand into machinery that does not work too well at best.

Market

The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.

The markets are moved by animal spirits, and not by reason.

Markets are too complex to manipulate beneficially.

Marriage

No matter how happily a woman may be married, it always pleases her to discover that there is a nice man who wishes she were not.

Marriage is our last, best chance to grow up.

Nothing flatters a man as much as the happiness of his wife; he is always proud of himself as the source of it.

Marriage is neither heaven nor hell; it is simply purgatory.

Where there's marriage without love, there will be love without marriage.

The Japanese have a word for it. It's judo -- the art of conquering by yielding. The Western equivalent of judo is, "Yes, dear."

When a girl marries, she exchanges the attentions of many men for the inattention of one.

Marriage is a mistake every man should make.

As to marriage or celibacy, let a man take which course he will, he will be sure to repent.

A good marriage would be between a blind wife and deaf husband.

A man in love is incomplete until he is married. Then he is finished.

By all means marry: If you get a good wife, you'll become happy; if you get a bad one, you'll become a philosopher.

Choose in marriage only a woman whom you would choose as a friend if she were a man.

When should a man marry? A young man, not yet; an elder man, not at all.

I like being single. I'm always there when I need me.

Is not marriage an open question, when it is alleged, from the beginning of the world, that such as are in the institution wish to get out, and such as are out wish to get in?

Keep your eyes wide open before marriage, half shut afterwards.

Love is an ideal thing, marriage a real thing; a confusion of the real with the ideal never goes unpunished.

One should always be in love. That is the reason one should never marry.

The average woman must inevitably view her actual husband with a certain disdain; he is anything but her ideal. In consequence, she cannot help feeling that her children are cruelly handicapped by the fact that he is their father.

'Tis more blessed to give than receive; for example, wedding presents.

We were happily married for eight months. Unfortunately, we were married for four and a half years.

What nonsense people talk about happy marriages! A man can be happy with any woman so long as he doesn't love her.

When a man steals your wife, there is no better revenge than to let him keep her.

When I was a young man, I vowed never to marry until I found the ideal woman. Well, I found her -- but alas, she was waiting for the ideal man.

When two people are under the influence of the most violent, most insane, most delusive, and most transient of passions, they are required to swear that they will remain in that excited, abnormal, and exhausting condition continuously until death do them part.

I belong to Bridegrooms Anonymous. Whenever I feel like getting married, they send over a lady in a housecoat and hair curlers to burn my toast for me.

The hardest task in a girl's life is to prove to a man that his intentions are serious.

It is assumed that the woman must wait, motionless, until she is wooed. That is how the spider waits for the fly.

A husband is what is left of the lover after the nerve has been extracted.

Men are horribly tedious when they are good husbands, and abominably conceited when they are not.

Marriage is the price men pay for sex, sex is the price women pay for marriage.

I think of my wife, and I think of Lot,
And I think of the lucky break he got.

We sleep in separate rooms, we have dinner apart, we take separate vacations -- we're doing everything we can to keep our marriage together.

Never go to bed mad. Stay up and fight.

I never knew what real happiness was until I got married. And by then it was too late.

When a man brings his wife flowers for no reason -- there's a reason.

Take my wife . . . please!

Bride, n. A woman with a fine prospect of happiness behind her.

If I ever marry, it will be on a sudden impulse, as a man shoots himself.

I respect the institution of marriage. I have always thought that every woman should marry -- and no man.

A man's friendships are, like his will, invalidated by marriage.

I don't see why I have to make one man miserable when I can make so many men happy.

Marriage is the death of hope.

Sex alleviates tension. Marriage causes it.

It should be a very happy marriage; they are both so much in love with him.

There's nothing in the world like the devotion of a married woman. It's a thing no married man knows anything about.

Men marry because they are tired; women, because they are curious; both are disappointed.

I think men who have a pierced ear are better prepared for marriage. They've experienced pain and bought jewelry.

I love being married. It's so great to find that one special person you want to annoy for the rest of your life.

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.

Metellus Numidicus, the censor, acknowledged to the Roman people, in a public oration, that had kind nature allowed us to exist without the help of women, we should be delivered from a very troublesome companion; and he could recommend matrimony only as the sacrifice of private pleasure to public duty.

But those who marry will face many troubles in this life, and I want to spare you this.

But a married man is concerned about the affairs of this world -- how he can please his wife -- and his interests are divided.

For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh.

In the most rigorous [Roman] laws, a wife was condemned to support a gamester, a drunkard, or a libertine, unless he were guilty of homicide, poison, or sacrilege, in which cases the marriage, as it should seem, might have been dissolved by the hand of the executioner.

A society in which marriage is encouraged and industry prevails soon repairs the accidental losses of pestilence and war . . .

My wife doesn't care what I do when I'm away, as long as I don't have a good time.

I've traveled the world and been about everywhere you can imagine. There's not anything I'm scared of except my wife.

A man may be a fool and not know it -- but not if he is married.

Martyrdom

The tyrant dies and his rule is over; the martyr dies and his rule begins.

To die for an idea is to set a rather high price upon conjecture.

Marxist

All I know is I'm not a Marxist.

Mask

Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.

Mathematics

Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty - a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture.

Media

I do not take a single newspaper, nor read one a month and I feel myself infinitely the happier for it.

Remember, son, many a good story has been ruined by over-verification.

The sports page records people's accomplishments, the front page usually records nothing but man's failures.

For most folks, no news is good news; for the press, good news is not news.

To read a newspaper is to refrain from reading something worthwhile. The first discipline of education must therefore be to refuse resolutely to feed the mind with canned chatter.

Medicine

The true aim of medicine is not to make men virtuous; it is to safeguard and rescue them from the consequences of their vices. The physician does not preach repentance; he offers absolution.

Mediocrity

Some men are born mediocre, some men achieve mediocrity, and some men have mediocrity thrust upon them.

Only a mediocre person is always at his best.

Perseverance, n. A lowly virtue whereby mediocrity achieves an inglorious success.

Memory

God gave us memory that we might have roses in December.

I never forgive, but I always forget.

It isn't so astonishing, the number of things that I can remember, as the number of things I can remember that aren't so.

Our memories are independent of our wills. It is not so easy to forget.

Men And Women

Like the ski resort of girls looking for husbands and husbands looking for girls, the situation is not as symmetrical as it might seem.

The great question which I have not been able to answer, despite my 30 years of research into the feminine soul, is "What does woman want?"

If a woman likes another woman, she's cordial. If she doesn't like her, she's very cordial.

Women are like elephants. They are interesting to look at, but I wouldn't want to own one.

I dress for women -- and I undress for men.

The average girl would rather have beauty than brains because she knows the average man can see much better than he can think.

She was not a woman likely to settle for equality when sex gave her an advantage.

Men have a much better time of it than women; for one thing, they marry later; for another thing, they die earlier.

A man is a person who will pay two dollars for a one-dollar item he wants. A woman will pay one dollar for a two-dollar item she doesn't want.

I never hated a man enough to give him his diamonds back.

Men become old, but they never become good.

A woman wants a man who will satisfy her every want and need. A man wants every woman to satisfy his one want and need.

I married beneath me -- all women do.

A wise woman will always let her husband have her way.

When a man opens the car door for his wife, it's either a new car or a new wife.

Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned,
Nor hell a fury like a woman scorned.

If I were asked . . . to what the singular prosperity and growing strength of [Americans] ought mainly to be attributed, I should reply: to the superiority of their women.

When women kiss it always reminds me of prize-fighters shaking hands.

She strode like a grenadier, was strong and upright like an obelisk, had a beautiful face, a candid brow, and not a thought of her own in her head.

Disguise our bondage as we will,
'Tis woman, woman, rules us still.

'Tis strange what a man may do, and a woman yet think him an angel.

A man may be so much of everything that he is nothing of anything.

A woman is a woman until the day she dies, but a man's a man only as long as he can.

Some men are alive only because it is illegal to kill them.

A beautiful woman is a blessing from Heaven, but a good cigar is a smoke.

Boys will be boys, and so will a lot of middle-aged men.

Brigands will demand your money or your life, but a woman will demand both.

Lady Nancy Astor: "Winston, if you were my husband, I'd put poison in your coffee."
Winston Churchill: "Nancy, if you were my wife, I'd drink it."

Let thy maid servant be faithful, strong, and homely.

Men's magazines often feature pictures of naked ladies. Women's magazines also often feature pictures of naked ladies. This is because the female body is a beautiful work of art, while the male body is hairy and lumpy and should not be seen by the light of day.

Take my word for it, the silliest woman can manage a clever man, but it needs a very clever woman to manage a fool.

To find out a girl's faults, praise her to her girl friends.

When there is an old maid in the house, a watch dog is unnecessary.

Women sometimes forgive a man who forces the opportunity, but never a man who misses one.

I asked a Burmese why women, after centuries of following their men, now walk ahead. He said there were many unexploded land mines since the war.

I don't mind living in a man's world as long as I can be a woman in it.

Whether women are better than men I cannot say -- but I can say they are certainly no worse.

She wore far too much rouge last night and not quite enough clothes. That is always a sign of despair in a woman.

Most women are not as young as they are painted.

A man's womenfolk, whatever their outward show of respect for his merit and authority, always regard him secretly as an ass, and with something akin to pity.

Whatever women do, they must do twice as well as men to be thought half as good. Luckily, this is not difficult.

George Moore unexpectedly pinched my behind. I felt rather honored that my behind should have drawn the attention of the great master of English prose.

She plucked from my lapel the invisible strand of lint -- the universal act of women to proclaim ownership.

Young men want to be faithful, and are not; old men want to be faithless, and cannot.

I've been in love with the same woman for forty-one years. If my wife finds out, she'll kill me.

Most women set out to try to change a man, and when they have changed him they do not like him.

On one issue at least, men and women agree: they both distrust women.

Women do not like timid men. Cats do not like prudent rats.

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

No trust is to be placed in women.

There is no fouler fiend than a woman when her mind is bent to evil.

The gods have sent medicines for the venom of serpents, but there is no medicine for a bad woman. She is more noxious than the viper, or than fire itself.

I trust only one thing in a woman: that she will not come to life again after she is dead. In all other things I distrust her.

In point of morals, the average woman is, even for business, too crooked.

Never trust a woman, even though she has given you ten sons.

Woman, like good wine, is a sweet poison.

Women are like death: they pursue those who flee from them, and flee from those who pursue them.

A thousand men can easily live together in peace, but two women, even if they be sisters, can never do so.

A man always blames the woman who fools him. In the same way he blames the door he walks into in the dark.

To attract men, I wear a perfume called "New Car Interior."

Women have a hard time of it in this world. They are oppressed by man-made laws, man-made social customs, masculine egoism, the delusion of masculine superiority. Their one comfort is the assurance that, even though it may be impossible to prevail against man, it is always possible to enslave and torture a man.

Women always excel men in that sort of wisdom which comes from experience. To be a woman is in itself a terrible experience.

Women have simple tastes. They can get pleasure out of the conversation of children in arms and men in love.

The allurement that women hold out to men is precisely the allurement that Cape Hatteras holds out to sailors: they are enormously dangerous and hence enormously fascinating. To the average man, doomed to some banal drudgery all his life long, they offer the only grand hazard that he ever encounters. Take them away, and his existence would be as flat and secure as that of a moo-cow.

All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That is his.

Between men and women there is no friendship possible. There is passion, enmity, worship, love, but no friendship.

King Solomon loved many strange women.

On Valentine's Day, millions of men give millions of women flowers, cards and candy as a heartfelt expression of the emotion that also motivates men to observe anniversaries and birthdays: fear.

Women in general seem to me to be appreciably more intelligent than men. A great many of them suffer in silence from the imbecilities of their husbands.

In every age and country, the wiser, or at least the stronger, of the two sexes, has usurped the powers of the state, and confined the other to the cares and pleasures of domestic life.

All other men govern their wives; but we command all other men, and our wives us.

Women [in ancient Rome] were condemned to the perpetual tutelage of parents, husbands, or guardians; a sex created to please and obey was never supposed to have attained the age of reason and experience. Such, at least, was the stern and haughty spirit of the ancient law . . .

[Thales] thanked fortune for three things: first of all, that he had been born a man and not a beast; secondly, that he was a man and not a woman; and thirdly, that he was a Greek and not a barbarian.

Women don't want to hear what you think. Women want to hear what they think -- in a deeper voice.

If a woman has "It," she doesn't need anything else; but if she doesn't have "It," it doesn't matter what else she has.

Military

Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition.

Veni, vidi, vici.
I came, I saw, I conquered.

I dropped an aerial torpedo right in the center, and the group opened up like a flowering rose. It was most entertaining.

War hath no fury like a non-combatant.

They told me it would disrupt my life less if I got killed sooner.

In defeat, unbeatable; in victory, unbearable.

These are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.

As long as mankind shall continue to bestow more liberal applause on their destroyers than on their benefactors, the thirst of military glory will ever be the vice of the most exalted characters.

The progress of manufactures and commerce insensibly collects a large multitude within the walls of a city: but these citizens are no longer soldiers; and the arts which adorn and improve the state of civil society, corrupt the habits of the military life.

[A] military force was collected in Europe, formidable by their arms and numbers, if the generals had understood the science of command, and the soldiers the duty of obedience.

Mind

I am not absent-minded. It is the presence of mind that makes me unaware of everything else.

Merely having an open mind is nothing. The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.

The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of Hell, a hell of Heaven.

Miracle

Everything is miraculous. It is miraculous that one does not melt in one's bath.

Miscellaneous

Once upon a time, there was a non-conforming sparrow who decided not to fly south for the winter. However, soon after the weather turned cold, the sparrow changed his mind and reluctantly started to fly south. After a short time, ice began to form his on his wings and he fell to earth in a barnyard almost frozen. A cow passed by and crapped on this little bird and the sparrow thought it was the end, but the manure warmed him and defrosted his wings. Warm and happy the little sparrow began to sing. Just then, a large Tom cat came by and, hearing the chirping, investigated the sounds. As Old Tom cleared away the manure, he found the chirping bird and promptly ate him.

There are three morals to this story:

Everyone who shits on you is not necessarily your enemy.
Everyone who gets you out of shit is not necessarily your friend.
If you are warm and happy in a pile of shit, keep your mouth shut.

I don't deserve this award, but I have arthritis and I don't deserve that either.

What's not worth doing is not worth doing well.

"Are you lost daddy," I asked tenderly.

"Shut up," he explained.

It is idle to play the lyre for an ass.

Misfortune

We all have strength enough to endure the misfortunes of others.

Depend upon it that if a man talks of his misfortunes there is something in them that is not disagreeable to him; for where there is nothing but pure misery there never is any recourse to the mention of it.

What man ever blamed himself for his misfortune?

Moderate

In the field of controversy I always pity the moderate party, who stand on the open middle ground exposed to the fire of both sides.

Moderation

I have not been afraid of excess: excess on occasion is exhilarating. It prevents moderation from acquiring the deadening effect of a habit.

Moderation is a fatal thing. Nothing succeeds like excess.

Total abstinence is easier than perfect moderation.

Constantly practise abstinence and temperance, so that you may be as wakeful after eating as before.

Never go to excess, but let moderation be your guide.

Modesty

Don't be so humble. You're not that great.

I was born modest; not all over, but in spots.

I have offended God and mankind because my work didn't reach the quality it should have.

Modesty is the only sure bait when you angle for praise.

When you're as great as I am, it's hard to be humble.

If only I had a little humility, I would be perfect.

Monk

The peace of the Eastern church was invaded by a swarm of fanatics [monks], incapable of fear, or reason, or humanity; and the Imperial troops acknowledged, without shame, that they were much less apprehensive of an encounter with the fiercest Barbarians.

Pleasure and guilt are synonymous terms in the language of the monks, and they discovered, by experience, that rigid fasts, and abstemious diet, are the most effectual preservatives against the impure desires of the flesh.

The monastic studies have tended, for the most part, to darken, rather than to dispel, the cloud of superstition.

I have somewhere heard or read the frank confession of a Benedictine abbot: "My vow of poverty has given me a hundred thousand crowns a year; my vow of obedience has raised me to the rank of a sovereign prince." -- I forget the consequences of his vow of chastity.

[The monks'] credulity debased and vitiated the faculties of the mind: they corrupted the evidence of history; and superstition gradually extinguished the hostile light of philosophy and science.

[All] the manly virtues were oppressed by the servile and pusillanimous reign of the monks.

[The monks'] minds were inaccessible to reason or mercy . . .

Morality

When the president does it, that means it is not illegal.

It doesn't matter what you do in the bedroom as long as you don't do it in the streets and frighten the horses.

All the things I really like to do are either immoral, illegal or fattening.

I profoundly believe it takes a lot of practice to become a moral slob.

Conscience is the inner voice that warns us somebody may be looking.

Moral indignation is in most cases two percent moral, forty-eight percent indignation, and fifty percent envy.

Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for the law.

There is perhaps no phenomenon which contains so much destructive feeling as moral indignation, which permits envy or hate to be acted out under the guise of virtue.

In matters of principle, stand like a rock; in matters of taste, swim with the current.

Any of us can achieve virtue, if by virtue we merely mean the avoidance of the vices that do not attract us.

[Sir Stafford Cripps] has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire.

I say that a man must be certain of his morality for the simple reason that he has to suffer for it.

To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it.

He who postpones the hour of living rightly is like the rustic who waits for the river to run out before he crosses.

We have no government armed with the power capable of contending with human passions which are unbridled by morality and true religion.

Moron

Nature abhors a moron.

Mother

No matter how old a mother is, she watches her middle-aged children for signs of improvement.

Murder

If the desire to kill and the opportunity to kill came always together, who would escape hanging?

Music

How wonderful opera would be if there were no singers.

The notes I handle no better than many pianists. But the pauses between the notes -- ah, that is where the art resides!

Too many pieces of music finish too long after the end.

She said, "I know you . . . you cannot sing". I said, "That's nothing, you should hear me play piano."

When one woman was asked how long she had been going to symphony concerts, she paused to calculate and replied, "Forty-seven years -- and I find I mind it less and less."

I don't know anything about music. In my line you don't have to.

There's nothing remarkable about it. All one has to do is hit the right keys at the right time and the instrument plays itself.

Myth

If a man is offered a fact which goes against his instincts, he will scrutinize it closely, and unless the evidence is overwhelming, he will refuse to believe it. If, on the other hand, he is offered something which affords a reason for acting in accordance to his instincts, he will accept it even on the slightest evidence. The origin of myths is explained in this way.

Nature

A vacuum is a hell of a lot better than some of the stuff that nature replaces it with.

Is dishwater dull? Naturalists with microscopes have told me that it teems with quiet fun.

The universe is not hostile, nor yet is it friendly. It is simply indifferent.

In nature there are neither rewards nor punishments -- there are consequences.

[In Nature:] No arts, no letters, no society, and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death, and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

But the works of man are impotent against the assaults of nature . . .

The law of nature instructs most animals to cherish and educate their infant progeny. The law of reason inculcates to the human species the returns of filial piety.

Navy

Don't talk to me about naval tradition. It's nothing but rum, sodomy and the lash.

Necessary

The graveyards are full of indispensable men.

There is no such thing as a necessary man.

Negligence

A little neglect may breed great mischief . . . for the want of a nail the shoe was lost; for the want of a shoe the horse was lost; and for the want of a horse the rider was lost.

Noise

Noise proves nothing. Often a hen who has merely laid an egg cackles as if she had laid an asteroid.

Nonconformist

If there is anything the nonconformist hates worse than a conformist it's another nonconformist who doesn't conform to the prevailing standards of nonconformity

Nonconformists travel as a rule in bunches. You rarely find a nonconformist who goes it alone. And woe to him inside a nonconformist clique who does not conform with nonconformity.

Why do you have to be a nonconformist like everybody else?

Oakland

When you get there [Oakland], there isn't any there there.

The trouble with Oakland is that when you get there it's there!

Old Age

I want a house that has got over all its troubles; I don't want to spend the rest of my life bringing up a young and inexperienced house.

Grandchildren don't make a man feel old; it's the knowledge that he's married to a grandmother.

Who knows whether in retirement I shall be tempted to the last infirmity of mundane minds, which is to write a book.

The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.

If I'd known I was going to live so long, I'd have taken better care of myself.

A man is only as old as the woman he feels.

"Next year? Peter, at my age I don't even buy green bananas."

When death comes near the old find that age is no longer burdensome.

When our vices quit us we flatter ourselves with the belief that it is we who quit them.

My only fear is that I may live too long. This would be a subject of dread to me.

It is not the end of joy that makes old age so sad, but the end of hope.

It is the common calamity of old age, to lose whatever might have rendered it desirable.

Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion;
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

Opinion

He who says what he likes shall hear what he does not like.

Public opinion is a compound of folly, weakness, prejudice, wrong feeling, right feeling, obstinacy, and newspaper paragraphs.

Too often we . . . enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.

You've no idea what a poor opinion I have of myself -- and how little I deserve it.

Absurdity, n. A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion.

Opinion is ultimately determined by the feelings, and not by the intellect.

Opinions are the cheapest commodities in the world.

We think very few people sensible, except those who are of our opinion.

The rule is perfect: in all matters of opinion our adversaries are insane.

What the historian Elie Kedourie called "the Chatham House Version" -- that toxic amalgam of smugness, moral relativism, and cherished feelings of guilt about the achievements of Western civilization -- everywhere nurtured the catechism of established opinion.

You probably wouldn't worry about what people think of you if you could know how seldom they do.

Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.

I think we ought always to entertain our opinions with some measure of doubt. I shouldn't wish people dogmatically to believe any philosophy, not even mine.

The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd; indeed in view of the silliness of the majority of mankind, a widespread belief is more likely to be foolish than sensible.

Opportunity

What is more mortifying than to feel that you have missed the plum for want of courage to shake the tree?

Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.

Oppression

It is doubtful if the oppressed ever fight for freedom. They fight for pride and power -- power to oppress others. The oppressed want above all to imitate their oppressors; they want to retaliate.

In [Nazi] Germany, they came first for the Communists,
And I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist;
And then they came for the trade unionists,
And I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist;
And then they came for the Jews,
And I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew;
And then . . . they came for me . . .
And by that time there was no one left to speak up.

Optimism And Pessimism

The optimist proclaims we live in the best of all possible worlds, and the pessimist fears this is true.

If one truly has lost hope, one would not be on hand to say so.

He who despairs over an event is a coward, but he who holds hopes for the human condition is a fool.

There exists in human nature a strong propensity to depreciate the advantages, and to magnify the evils, of the present times.

Orator

He can best be described as one of those orators who, before they get up, do not know what they are going to say; when they are speaking, do not know what they are saying; and when they have sat down, do not know what they have said.

Oratory

The object of oratory is not truth but persuasion.

They talk most who have the least to say.

The thoughtless are rarely wordless.

Originality

What a good thing Adam had -- when he said a good thing, he knew nobody had said it before.

There is nothing new under the sun.

Your manuscript is both good and original; but the parts that are good are not original, and the parts that are original are not good.

My guess is that well over 80 percent of the human race goes through life without having a single original thought.

Painting

Everyone wants to understand painting. Why don't they try to understand the singing of birds? People love the night, a flower, everything that surrounds them without trying to understand them. But painting -- that they must understand.

I do not paint a portrait to look like the subject, rather does the person grow to look like his portrait.

Panama Canal

We should keep the Panama Canal. After all we stole it fair and square.

Parents

My father was frightened by his mother. I was frightened by my father, and I'm damned well going to make sure that my children are frightened of me.

A Jewish man with parents alive is a 15-year-old boy, and will remain a 15-year-old boy until they die.

Parents are sometimes a bit of a disappointment to their children. They don't fulfill the promise of their early years.

Always obey your parents, when they are present.

Party

After all, what is your hosts' purpose in having a party? Surely not for you to enjoy yourself; if that were their sole purpose, they'd have simply sent champagne and women over to your place by taxi.

Passion

It is with our passions as it is with fire and water -- they are good servants, but bad masters.

How well I remember the aged poet Sophocles, when in answer to the question, "How does love suit with age, Sophocles -- are you still the man you were?" he replied, "Peace, most gladly have I escaped the thing of which you speak; I feel as if I had escaped from a mad and furious master."

Past

This only is denied to God: the power to undo the past.

Patience

Patience, n. A minor form of despair, disguised as a virtue.

So long as Heaven has condemned us to suffer, patience is a virtue; but if we reject the proffered deliverance, it degenerates into blind and stupid despair.

Patience has its limits. Take it too far, and it's cowardice.

Patriotism

Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.

[A] country without a word to describe its love for what is best within it is a country ill-equipped to defend what is best within it.

Peace

That they may have a little peace, even the best dogs are compelled to snarl occasionally.

Peace, n. In international affairs, a period of cheating between two periods of fighting.

If you want peace, prepare for war. (Si vis pacem, para bellum. Alternatively, Qui desiderat pacem, praeparet bellum.)

The terror of the Roman arms added weight and dignity to the moderation of the emperors. They preserved the peace by a constant preparation for war.

The name of peace is sweet, the thing itself is most salutary.

[Peace] cannot be honorable or secure, if the sovereign betrays a pusillanimous aversion to war.

If we desire to secure peace, . . . it must be known that we are, at all times, ready for war.

People

If you want people to think well of you, do not speak well of yourself.

Too bad that all the people who know how to run the country are busy driving taxicabs and cutting hair.

Most of the trouble in the world is caused by people wanting to be important.

It is in vain to hope to please all alike. Let a man stand with his face in what direction he will, he must necessarily turn his back on one half of the world.

For every credibility gap there is a gullibility fill.

The biggest gap in the world is the gap between the justice of a cause and the motives of the people pushing it.

When the people applauded him wildly, [Phocion] turned to one of his friends and said, "Have I said something foolish?"

Treat people as if they were what they ought to be and you help them to become what they are capable of being.

I wouldn't want to join any club that would accept me as a member.

I am not a bit afraid of Siegfried Sassoon. That man can think. I am afraid only of people who cannot think.

We are all worms. But I do believe that I am a glowworm.

Es mejor estar solo que mal acompañado. (It is better to be alone than in bad company).

Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do and they will surprise you with their ingenuity.

Perfection

The pursuit of perfection prevents achievement of the satisfactory.

The desire of perfection became the ruling passion of their soul; and it is well known, that while reason embraces a cold mediocrity, our passions hurry us, with rapid violence, over the space which lies between the most opposite extremes.

Perseverance

One need not hope in order to undertake; nor succeed in order to persevere.

Fall down seven times, get up eight.

[Let] us run with perseverance the race marked out for us.

"Fight on, my men," says Sir Andrew Barton,
"I am hurt, but I am not slain;
I'll lay me down and bleed awhile,
And then I'll rise and fight again."

Persistence

It is better to light one candle than to curse the darkness.

Persuasion

Persuasion is the resource of the feeble; and the feeble can seldom persuade . . .

We are generally the better persuaded by the reasons we discover ourselves than by those given to us by others.

Pessimism

My pessimism goes to the point of suspecting the sincerity of pessimists.

Cheer up! the worst is yet to come.

Pessimist

A pessimist is a man who looks both ways before crossing a one-way street.

There is no sadder sight than a young pessimist.

Philosopher

The philosopher is Nature's pilot -- and there you have our difference: to be in hell is to drift; to be in heaven is to steer.

Philosophy

I have a simple philosophy. Fill what's empty. Empty what's full. And scratch where it itches.

The philosophers have only interpreted the world; the thing, however, is to change it.

It is good that a philosopher should remind himself, now and then, that he is a particle pontificating on infinity.

If I wished to punish a province, I would have it governed by philosophers.

Cartesian, adj. Relating to Descartes, a famous philosopher, author of the celebrated dictum, Cogito ergo sum -- whereby he was pleased to suppose he demonstrated the reality of human existence. The dictum might be improved, however, thus: Cogito cogito ergo cogito sum -- "I think that I think, therefore I think that I am;" as close an approach to certainty as any philosopher has yet made.

Kant was probably the worst writer ever heard of on earth before Karl Marx. Some of his ideas were really quite simple, but he always managed to make them seem unintelligible. I hope he is in Hell.

Feel deeply to think clearly.

It is best, it seems to me, to separate one's inner striving from one's trade as far as possible. It is not good when one's daily bread is tied to God's special blessing.

Pity

Pity costs nothin' and ain't worth nothin'.

Planning

Our plans miscarry because they have no aim. When a man does not know what harbor he is making for, no wind is the right wind.

The plans differ; the planners are all alike . . .

It is a bad plan that admits of no modification.

I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.

The best time to plant a tree is ten years ago. The second best time is now.

Pleasure

Pleasure for an hour, a bottle of wine; pleasure for a year, marriage; pleasure for a lifetime, a garden.

Pleasure is by no means an infallible guide, but it is the least fallible.

Pleasure is Nature's test, her sign of approval. When man is happy, he is in harmony with himself and his environment.

Poet

No honest poet can ever feel quite sure of the permanent value of what he has written: he may have wasted his time and messed up his life for nothing.

Inside every man there is a poet who died young.

We poets in our youth begin in gladness;
But thereof come in the end despondency and madness.

Many brave men lived before Agamemnon; but all are overwhelmed in eternal night, unwept, unknown, because they lack a sacred poet.

Poetry

I've written some poetry I don't understand myself.

Police

I have never seen a situation so dismal that a policeman couldn't make it worse.

Political Scientist

Political scientists almost everywhere have promoted the expansion of government power. They have functioned as the clergy of oppression.

Politician

An honest politician is one who when he is bought will stay bought.

You do not know, you cannot know, the difficulty of the life of a politician. It means every minute of the day or night, every ounce of your energy. There is no rest, no relaxation. Enjoyment? A politician does not know the meaning of the word.

90% of the politicians give the other 10% a bad reputation.

Politicians are the same all over. They promise to build bridges, even where there are no rivers.

We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office.

Politics

[I feel] somewhat like the boy in Kentucky who stubbed his toe while running to see his sweetheart. The boy said he was too big to cry, and far too badly hurt to laugh.

An eminent American is reported to have said to friends who wished to put him forward, "Gentlemen, let there be no mistake. I should make a good president, but a very bad candidate."

Seriously, I do not think I am fit for the presidency.

The illegal we do immediately, the unconstitutional takes a little longer.

Politics is more dangerous than war, for in war you are only killed once.

In politics a community of hatred is almost always the foundation of friendships.

Politics is war without bloodshed, and war is politics with blood.

In politics, a straight line is the shortest distance to disaster.

The Labour Party is going about the country stirring up apathy.

There cannot be a crisis next week. My schedule is already full.

Politics, and the fate of mankind, are shaped by men without ideals and without greatness.

I just received the following wire from my generous Daddy. "Dear Jack: Don't buy a single vote more than necessary. I'll be damned if I am going to pay for a landslide."

Politics is supposed to be the second oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first.

I gave 'em a sword. And they stuck it in, and they twisted it with relish. And I guess if I had been in their position, I'd have done the same.

Whenever a man has cast a longing eye on office, a rottenness begins in his conduct.

In statesmanship get formalities right, never mind about the moralities.

I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me.

David Watkins: "I'm accountable for the firings. The first lady did not direct me to fire them . . . Did I feel pressure by the desires and wishes of others? Yes, I did."

Questioner: "Could Hillary Rodham Clinton have suggested the firings?"

David Watkins: "Yes."

Would that . . . a sense of the true aim of life might elevate the tone of politics and trade till public and private honour became identical.

In politics, if you want anything said, ask a man; if you want anything done, ask a woman.

Revolutions have never lightened the burden of tyranny. They have only shifted it to another shoulder.

All socialism involves slavery.

Outlawing all atomic weapons could be a magnificent gesture. However, it should be remembered that Gettysburg had a local ordinance forbidding the discharge of firearms.

Until justice is blind to color, until education is unaware of race, until opportunity is unconcerned with the color of men's skins, emancipation will be a proclamation but not a fact.

The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings. The inherent virtue of Socialism is the equal sharing of miseries. [popular interpretation: Capitalism is the unequal sharing of wealth; socialism is the equal sharing of poverty.]

A man who is not a Liberal at sixteen has no heart; a man who is not a Conservative at sixty has no head.

If a politician murders his mother, the first response of the press or of his opponents will likely be not that it was a terrible thing to do, but rather that in a statement made six years before he had gone on record as being opposed to matricide.

The average citizen expresses pride in the American Bill of Rights and then seeks to protect his real estate by restrictive covenants.

Appeasers believe that if you keep on throwing steaks to a tiger, the tiger will become a vegetarian.

There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world; and that is an idea whose time has come.

The only liberty an inferior man really cherishes is the liberty to quit work, stretch out in the sun, and scratch himself.

I can remember way back when a liberal was one who was generous with his own money.

Join the army, see the world, meet interesting, exciting people, and kill them.

When you have to kill a man it costs nothing to be polite.

Revolutionary movements attract the best and worst elements in a given society.

If any demonstrator ever lays down in front of my car, it'll be the last car he'll ever lay down in front of.

The Italians . . . you can't find one who is honest.

I never dared be radical when young
For fear it would make me conservative when old.

I do wish [Calvin Coolidge] did not look as if he had been weaned on a pickle.

[Calvin Coolidge] is the first president to discover that what the American people want is to be left alone.

Diplomacy, n. The patriotic art of lying for one's country.

A diplomat is a person who can tell you to go to hell in such a way that you actually look forward to the trip.

There are no liberals behind steering wheels.

He was a long-limbed farmer, a God-fearing, freedom-loving, law-abiding rugged individualist who held that federal aid to anyone but farmers was creeping socialism.

A year ago Gerald Ford was unknown throughout America. Now he's unknown throughout the world.

When a dinner guest told him she liked neither his politics nor his mustache, Winston Churchill replied, "Madame, I see no earthly reason why you should come in contact with either."

In war, resolution; in defeat, defiance; in victory, magnanimity; in peace, good-will.

[The politician] is asked to stand, he wants to sit, and he is expected to lie.

A ruling intelligentsia, whether in Europe, Asia or Africa, treats the masses as raw material to be experimented on, processed, and wasted at will.

There is hardly an enormity committed in the twentieth century that was not foreshadowed and even advocated by some noble "man of words" in the nineteenth.

Nowhere at present is there such a measureless loathing of their country by educated people as in America.

. . . a constitution whose meaning changes as our notions of what it ought to mean changes is not worth a whole lot. To keep government up-to-date with modern notions of what good government ought to be, we do not need a constitution but only a ballot-box and a legislature.