Economic independence is the foundation of the only sort of freedom worth a damn

Well, I tell you, if I have been wrong in my agnosticism, when I die I’ll walk up to God in a manly way and say, Sir, I made an honest mistake.

Never underestimate the booberie of the booboisie.

The great secret of happiness in love is to be glad that the other fellow married her.

Religion is fundamentally opposed to everything I hold in veneration – courage, clear thinking, honesty, fairness, and, above all, love of the truth.

Sunday is a day given over by Americans to wishing that the themselves were dead and in Heaven, and that their neighbors were dead and in Hell.

There is no record in the history of a nation that ever gained anything valuable by being unable to defend itself.

I believe that all government is evil, and that trying to improve it is largely a waste of time.

Five years of Prohibition have had, at least, this one benign effect: they have completely disposed of all the favorite arguments of the Prohibitionists. None of the great boons and usufructs that were to follow the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment has come to pass. There is not less drunkenness in the Republic, but more. There is not less crime, but more. There is not less insanity, but more. The cost of government is not smaller, but vastly greater. Respect for law has not increased, but diminished.

People say we need religion when what they really mean is we need police.

My belief in free speech is so profound that I am seldom tempted to deny it to the other fellow. Nor do I make any effort to differentiate between the other fellow right and that other fellow wrong, for I am convinced that free speech is worth nothing unless it includes a full franchise to be foolish and even…malicious.

It is the natural tendency of the ignorant to believe what is not true. In order to overcome that tendency it is not sufficient to exhibit the true; it is also necessary to expose and denounce the false.

Journalism is to politician as dog is to lamp-post.

All government, in its essence, is a conspiracy against the superior man: its one permanent object is to oppress him and cripple him.

Women decide the larger questions of life correctly and quickly, not because they are lucky guessers, not because they are divinely inspired, not because they practise a magic inherited from savagery, but simply and solely because they have sense. They see at a glance what most men could not see with searchlights and telescopes…. They are the supreme realists of the race.

Unsuccessful candidates for the Presidency should be quietly hanged as a matter of public sanitation and decorum.

Courtroom : A place where Jesus Christ and Judas Iscariot would be equals, with the betting odds favoring Judas.

The most popular man under a democracy is not the most democratic man, but the most despotic man. The common folk delight in the exactions of such a man. They like him to boss them. Their natural gait is the goose step.

The whole drift of our law is toward the absolute prohibition of all ideas that diverge in the slightest form from the accepted platitudes, and behind that drift of law there is a far more potent force of growing custom, and under that custom there is a natural philosophy which erects conformity into the noblest of virtues and the free functioning of personality into a capital crime against society.

The State is not force alone. It depends upon the credulity of man quite as much as upon his docility. Its aim is not merely to make him obey, but also to make him want to obey.

The true function of art is to edit nature and so to make it coherent and lovely. The artist is a sort of impassioned proofreader, blue-pencilling the bad spelling of God.

Man is never honestly the fatalist, nor even the stoic. He fights his fate, often desperately. He is forever entering bold exceptions to the rulings of the bench of gods. This fighting, no doubt, makes for human progress, for it favors the strong and the brave. It also makes for beauty, for lesser men try to escape from a hopeless and intolerable world by creating a more lovely one of their own.

A bad artist almost always tries to conceal his incompetence by whooping up a new formula.

The businessman is the only man who is forever apologizing for his occupation.

You never push a noun against a verb without trying to blow up something.

A poet more than thirty years old is simply an overgrown child.

Of all the forms of visible otherworldliness, the Gothic is at once the most logical and the most beautiful. It reaches up magnificently-and a good half of it is palpably worthless.

Self-respect–the secure feeling that no one, as yet, is suspicious.

The best years are the forties; after 50 a man begins to deteriorate, but in his forties he is at the maximum of his villainy.

A man who knows a subject thoroughly, a man so soaked in it that he eats it, sleeps it and dreams it-this man can always teach it with success, no matter how little he knows of technical pedagogy.

All zoos actually offer to the public in return for the taxes spent upon them is a form of idle and witless amusement, compared to which a visit to a penitentiary, or even to a State legislature in session, is informing, stimulating and ennobling.

All successful newspapers are ceaselessly querulous and bellicose. They never defend anyone or anything if they can help it if the job is forced on them, they tackle it by denouncing someone or something else.

A home is not a mere transient shelter its essence lies in the personalities of the people who live in it.

The best teacher is not the one who knows most but the one who is most capable of reducing knowledge to that simple compound of the obvious and wonderful.The best teacher is not the one who knows most but the one who is most capable of reducing knowledge to that simple compound of the obvious and wonderful.

Imagine the Creator as a stand-up comedian – and at once the world becomes explicable.

Man is always looking for someone to boast to; woman is always looking for a shoulder to put her head on.

No married man is genuinely happy if he has to drink worse whisky than he used to drink when he was single.

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.

Strike an average between what a woman thinks of her husband a month before she marries him and what she thinks of him a year afterward, and you will have the truth about him.

Legend: A lie that has attained the dignity of age.

In war the heroes always outnumber the soldiers ten to one.

I hate all sports as rabidly as a person who likes sports hates common sense.

I never lecture, not because I am shy or a bad speaker, but simply because I detest the sort of people who go to lectures and don’t want to meet them.

Women have simple tastes. They get pleasure out of the conversation of children in arms and men in love.

The difference between a moral man and a man of honor is that the latter regrets a discreditable act, even when it has worked and he has not been caught.

One of the most mawkish of human delusions is the notion that friendship should be eternal, or, at all events, life-long, and that any act which puts a term to it is somehow discreditable.

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

A national political campaign is better than the best circus ever heard of, with a mass baptism and a couple of hangings thrown in.

Every man is his own hell.

Most people are unable to write because they are unable to think, and they are unable to think because they congenitally lack the equipment to do so, just as they congenitally lack the equipment to fly over the moon.

It is the place where all the aspirations of the Western World meet to form one vast master aspiration, as powerful as the suction of a steam dredge. It is the icing on the pie called Christian civilization.

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.

The effort to reconcile science and religion is almost always made, not by theologians, but by scientists unable to shake off altogether the piety absorbed with their mother’s milk.

An author, like any other so-called artist, is a man in whom the normal vanity of all men is so vastly exaggerated that he finds it a sheer impossibility to hold it in.

A man’s women folk, whatever their outward show of respect for his merit and authority, always regard him secretly as an ass, and with something akin to pity.

Sin is a dangerous toy in the hands of the virtuous. It should be left to the congenitally sinful, who know when to play with it and when to let it alone.

The basic fact about human existence is not that it is a tragedy, but that it is a bore. It is not so much a war as an endless standing in line.

Science, at bottom, is really anti-intellectual. It always distrusts pure reason, and demands the production of objective fact.

The artist is not a reporter, but a Great Teacher. It is not his business to depict the world as it is, but as it ought to be.

Perhaps the most valuable of all human possessions, next to an aloof and sniffish air, is the reputation of being well-to-do.

It is impossible to believe that the same God who permitted His own son to die a bachelor regards celibacy as an actual sin.

The most costly of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind.

Before a man speaks it is always safe to assume that he is a fool. After he speaks, it is seldom necessary to assume it.

Men have a much better time of it than women. For one thing, they marry later; for another thing, they die earlier.

My guess is that well over 80 percent of the human race goes through life without having a single original thought.

War will never cease until babies begin to come into the world with larger cerebrums and smaller adrenal glands.

The chief knowledge that a man gets from reading books is the knowledge that very few of them are worth reading.

Whenever a husband and a wife begin to discuss their marriage they are giving evidence at a coroner’s inquest.

Voting is simply a way of determining which side is the stronger without putting it to the test of fighting.

No matter how much a woman loved a man, it would still give her a glow to see him commit suicide for her.

Every autobiography…becomes an absorbing work of fiction, with something of the charm of a cryptogram.

Nothing is so abject and pathetic as a politician who has lost his job, save only a retired stud-horse.

Love is based on a view of women that is impossible to those who have had any experience with them.

The notion that anything is gained by fixing a language in a groove is cherished only by pedants.

Sunday school: a prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.

Whenever A attempts by law to impose his moral standards on B, A is most likely a scoundrel.

The great artists of the world are never Puritans, and seldom even ordinarily respectable.

Opera in English is, in the main, just about as sensible as baseball in Italian.

Tis always more blessed to give than to receive; for example, wedding presents.

Great artists are modest almost as seldom as they are faithful to their wives.

Poetry is a comforting piece of fiction set to more or less lascivious music.

A man may be a fool and not know it, but not if he is married.

Injustice is relatively easy to bear; what stings is justice.

Women do not like timid men. Cats do not like prudent rats.

The only really happy folk are married women and single men.

Nothing can come out of an artist that is not in the man.

A professor must have a theory as a dog must have fleas.

Creator. A comedian whose audience is afraid to laugh.

Time is a great legalizer, even in the field of morals.

Of all escape mechanisms, death is the most efficient.

Most people want security in this world, not liberty.

Alimony: The ransom that the happy pay to the devil.

The only American invention as perfect as a sonnet.

As the arteries grow hard, the heart grows soft.

Change is not progress.

All government, of course, is against liberty.

Dachshund: A half-a-dog high and a dog-and-a-half long.

It is more blessed to give than receive; for example, wedding presents.

Lawyer: one who protects us against robbery by taking away the temptation.

After all, all he did was string together a lot of old, well-known quotations.

Love is photogenic. It needs darkness room to develop.

If I ever marry, it will be on a sudden impulse – as Aman shoots himself.

The common argument that crime is caused by poverty is a kind of slander on the poor.

Freedom of press is limited to those who own one.

When women kiss it always reminds one of prize fighters shaking hands.

I go on working for the same reason that a hen goes on laying eggs.

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

The cynics are right nine times out of ten.

To be in love is merely to be in a state of perceptual anesthesia – to mistake an ordinary young woman for a goddess.

The penalty for laughing in a courtroom is six months in jail; if it were not for this penalty, the jury would never hear the evidence.

Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.

Immorality: the morality of those who are having a better time.

Life is a constant oscillation between the sharp horns of dilemmas.

A church is a place in which gentlemen who have never been to heaven brag about it to persons who will never get there.

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

There are two kinds of Europeans: The smart ones, and those who stayed behind.

The opera…is to music what a bawdy house is to a cathedral.

The central belief of every moron is that he is the victim of a mysterious conspiracy against his common rights and true deserts.

Say what you will about the Ten Commandments, you must always come back to the pleasant fact that there are only ten of them.

Progress: The process whereby the human race has got rid of whiskers, the vermiform appendix and God.

Man is a beautiful machine that works very badly.

Love is the delusion that one woman differs from another.

It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics or chemistry.

If we assume that man actually does resemble God, then we are forced into the impossible theory that God is a coward, an idiot and a bounder.

For centuries, theologians have been explaining the unknowable in terms of the-not-worth-knowing.

What men value in this world is not rights but privileges.

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

Criticism is prejudice made plausible.

Conscience is a mother-in-law whose visit never ends.

Adultery is the application of democracy to love.

Never drink before sunset; Never drink more than 3 days in a row.

Marriage is a wonderful institution, but who would want to live in an institution?

In the duel of sex, woman fights from a dreadnought and man from an open raft.

I believe that all government is evil, and that trying to improve it is largely a waste of time.

All men are frauds. The only difference between them is that some admit it. I myself deny it.

Any man who afflicts the human race with ideas must be prepared to see them misunderstood.

There’s really no point to voting. If it made any difference, it would probably be illegal.

It is the dull man who is always sure, and the sure man who is always dull.

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

If the average man is made in God’s image, then such a man as Beethoven or Aristotle is plainly superior to God.

Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.

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.

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

Morality is doing what is right regardless of what you are told. Obedience is doing what is told regardless of what is right.

Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.

Love is like war: easy to begin but very hard to stop.

The state remains, as it was in the beginning, the common enemy of all well-disposed, industrious and decent men.

The state remains, as it was in the beginning, the common enemy of all well-disposed, industrious and decent men.

The ideal Government of all reflective men, from Aristotle onward, is one which lets the individual alone – one which barely escapes being no government at all.

When a new source of taxation is found it never means, in practice, that the old source is abandoned. It merely means that the politicians have two ways of milking the taxpayer where they had one before.

The ideal way to get rid of any infectious disease would be to shoot instantly every person who comes down with it.

A judge is a law student who marks his own examination papers.

The older I get the more I admire and crave competence, just simple competence, in any field from adultery to zoology.

[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.

Mankind has failed miserably in its effort to devise a rational system of government. The art of government is the exclusive possession of quacks and frauds. It has been so since the earliest days, and it will probably remain so until the end of time.

Justice is what you get when you run out of money.

It doesn’t take a majority to make a rebellion; it takes only a few determined leaders and a sound cause.

And what is a good citizen? Simply one who never says, does or thinks anything that is unusual. Schools are maintained in order to bring this uniformity up to the highest possible point. A school is a hopper into which children are heaved while they are still young and tender; therein they are pressed into certain standard shapes and covered from head to heels with official rubber-stamps.

Civilization, in fact, grows more maudlin and hysterical; especially under democracy it tends to degenerate into a mere combat of crazes; the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary. Wars are no longer waged by the will of superior men, capable of judging dispassionately and intelligently the causes behind them and the effects flowing out of them. The are now begun by first throwing a mob into a panic; they are ended only when it has spent its ferine fury.

Liberty and democracy are eternal enemies, and every one knows it who has ever given any sober reflection to the matter.

It is even harder for the average ape to believe that he has descended from man.

A large part of altruism, even when it is perfectly honest, is grounded upon the fact that it is uncomfortable to have unhappy people about one.

Men become civilized not in proportion to their willingness to believe, but in proportion to their willingness to doubt.

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

The federal [bank deposit] insurance scheme has worked up to now simply and solely because there have been very few bank failures. The next time we have a pestilence of them it will come to grief quickly enough, and if the good banks escape ruin with the bad ones it will be only because the taxpayer.

God must love the rich or he wouldn’t divide so much among so few of them.

The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it.

The plain fact is that education is itself a form of propaganda – a deliberate scheme to outfit the pupil, not with the capacity to weigh ideas, but with a simple appetite for gulping ideas ready-made. The aim is to make ‘good’ citizens, which is to say, docile and uninquisitive citizens.

Giving every man a vote has no more made men wise and free than Christianity has made them good.

Misogynist: A man who hates women as much as women hate one another.

The average man does not want to be free. he simply wants to be safe.

Equality before the law is probably forever unattainable. It is a noble ideal, but it can never be realized, for what men value in this world is not rights but privileges.

Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.

We are here and it is now. Further than that, all human knowledge is moonshine.

A philosopher is a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat that isn’t there. A theologian is the man who finds it.

The kind of man who wants the government to adopt and enforce his ideas is always the kind of man whose ideas are idiotic.

The men the American people admire most extravagantly are the most daring liars; the men they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth.

Happiness is the china shop; love is the bull.

Truth would quickly cease to be stranger than fiction, once we got as used to it.

We must respect the other fellow’s religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart.

Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority. The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong. All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men who have whooped them up and tried to enforce them. The truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant, in this field as in all others. His culture is based on “I am not too sure.

A society made up of individuals who were capable of original thought would probably be unendurable. The pressure of ideas would simply drive it frantic.

A newspaper is a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier.

A metaphysician is one who believes it when toxins from a dilapidated liver makes his brain whisper that mind is the boss of liver.

A great nation is any mob of people which produces at least one honest man a century.

A government, at bottom, is nothing more than a gang of men, and as a practical matter most of them are inferior men … Government is actually the worst failure of civilized man. There has never been a really good one, and even those that are most tolerable are arbitrary, cruel, grasping and unintelligent. Indeed, it would not be far wrong to describe the best as the common enemy of all decent citizens.

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.

The basic fact about human existence is not that it is a tragedy, but that it is a bore. It is not so much a war as an endless standing in line. The objection to it is not that it is predominantly painful, but that it is lacking in sense.

The fact is that the average man’s love of liberty is nine-tenths imaginary, exactly like his love of sense, justice, and truth. He is not actually happy when free; he is uncomfortable, a bit alarmed, and intolerably lonely.

Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority. The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong.

The trouble with Communism is the Communists, just as the trouble with Christianity is the Christians.

The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it.

In the United States, doing good has come to be, like patriotism, a favorite device of persons with something to sell.