Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.
Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.
The men the American public admire most extravagantly are the most daring liars; the men they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth.
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.
I believe that all government is evil, and that trying to improve it is largely a waste of time.
Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.
The most common of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind.
Giving every man a vote has no more made men wise and free than Christianity has made them good.
The demagogue is one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots.
Injustice is relatively easy to bear; what stings is justice.
It is hard to believe that a man is telling the truth when you know that you would lie if you were in his place.
It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics or chemistry.
It is the dull man who is always sure, and the sure man who is always dull.
The world always makes the assumption that the exposure of an error is identical with the discovery of truth--that the error and truth are simply opposite. They are nothing of the sort. What the world turns to, when it is cured of one error, is usually simply another error, and maybe one worse than the first one.
To die for an idea; it is unquestionably noble. But how much nobler it would be if men died for ideas that were true!
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.
(On Shakespeare:) After all, all he did was string together a lot of old, well-known quotations.
There is always a well-known solution to every human problem--neat, plausible, and wrong.
Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin to slit throats.