A man always remembers his first love with special tenderness, but after that he begins to bunch them.
Poetry has done enough when it charms, but prose must also convince.
It is even harder for the average ape to believe that he has descended from man.
Giving every man a vote has no more made men wise and free than Christianity has made them good.
Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.
Time stays, we go.
Every man sees in his relatives, and especially in his cousins, a series of grotesque caricatures of himself.
Communism, like any other revealed religion, is largely made up of prophecies.
Women always excel men in that sort of wisdom which comes from experience. To be a woman is in itself a terrible experience.
experience, men, wisdom & women
Women have simple tastes. They get pleasure out of the conversation of children in arms and men in love.
Whenever you hear a man speak of his love for his country, it is a sign that he expects to be paid for it.
What men value in this world is not rights but privileges.
Bachelors know more about women than married men if they didn't they'd be married too.
Temptation is an irresistible force at work on a movable body.
Whenever a husband and wife begin to discuss their marriage they are giving evidence at a coroner's inquest.
A good politician is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar.
All men are frauds. The only difference between them is that some admit it. I myself deny it.
A society made up of individuals who were all capable of original thought would probably be unendurable.
Husbands never become good they merely become proficient.
Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage.
art, government & science
Immorality: the morality of those who are having a better time.
A bad man is the sort who weeps every time he speaks of a good woman.
All government, of course, is against liberty.
Marriage is a wonderful institution, but who would want to live in an institution?
War will never cease until babies begin to come into the world with larger cerebrums and smaller adrenal glands.
It is impossible to imagine the universe run by a wise, just and omnipotent God, but it is quite easy to imagine it run by a board of gods.
Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.
In war the heroes always outnumber the soldiers ten to one.
Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.
I believe that all government is evil, and that trying to improve it is largely a waste of time.
The chief contribution of Protestantism to human thought is its massive proof that God is a bore.
Puritanism. The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.
A national political campaign is better than the best circus ever heard of, with a mass baptism and a couple of hangings thrown in.
I hate all sports as rabidly as a person who likes sports hates common sense.
Nine times out of ten, in the arts as in life, there is actually no truth to be discovered there is only error to be exposed.
Men have a much better time of it than women. For one thing, they marry later for another thing, they die earlier.
To be in love is merely to be in a state of perceptual anesthesia - to mistake an ordinary young woman for a goddess.
There is a saying in Baltimore that crabs may be prepared in fifty ways and that all of them are good.
Love is the delusion that one woman differs from another.
The opera is to music what a bawdy house is to a cathedral.
We must be willing to pay a price for freedom.
To die for an idea it is unquestionably noble. But how much nobler it would be if men died for ideas that were true!
Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.
It is impossible to imagine Goethe or Beethoven being good at billiards or golf.
In this world of sin and sorrow there is always something to be thankful for as for me, I rejoice that I am not a Republican.
The chief value of money lies in the fact that one lives in a world in which it is overestimated.
Adultery is the application of democracy to love.
Historian: an unsuccessful novelist.
Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.
Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.
Love is an emotion that is based on an opinion of women that is impossible for those who have had any experience with them.
experience, love & women
When women kiss it always reminds one of prize fighters shaking hands.
We are here and it is now. Further than that, all human knowledge is moonshine.
If women believed in their husbands they would be a good deal happier and also a good deal more foolish.
Honor is simply the morality of superior men.
It is hard to believe that a man is telling the truth when you know that you would lie if you were in his place.