Great Throughts Treasury

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

"The older I get the more I am convinced that, if I am ever to do anything worth a damn, it must be done entirely alone. Moreover, I am more comfortable that way."

"The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom."

"The only cure for contempt is counter-contempt."

"The only liberty an inferior man really cherishes is the liberty to quit work, stretch out in the sun, and scratch himself."

"The only obligation I recognize in this world is my duty to my immediate family"

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

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

"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."

"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."

"The plain fact is that I am not a fair man and don't want to hear both sides."

"The priest, realistically considered, is the most immoral of men, for he is always willing to sacrifice every other sort of good to the one good of his arcanum - the vague body of mysteries that he calls the truth."

"The public, with its mob yearning to be instructed, edified and pulled by the nose, demands certainties?. but there are no certainties."

"The real charm of the United States is that it is the only comic country ever heard of."

"The scientific impulse seems to me to be the very opposite of the religious impulse. When a man seeks knowledge he is trying to gain means of fighting his own way in the world, but when he prays he confesses that he is unable to do so. .... The feeling of abasement, of incapacity, is inseparable from the religious impulse, but against that feeling all exact knowledge makes war. The efficient man does not cry out "Save me, O God". On the contrary, he makes diligent efforts to save himself. But suppose he fails? Doesn't he throw himself, in the end, on the mercy of the gods? Not at all. He accepts his fate with philosophy, buoyed up by the consciousness that he has done his best. Irreligion, in a word, teaches men how to die with dignity, just as it teaches them how to live with dignity."

"The seasick passenger on an ocean liner detests the good sailor who stalks past him 265 times a day grandly smoking a large, greasy cigar. In precisely the same way the democrat hates the man who is having a better time in the world. This is the origin of democracy. It is also the origin of Puritanism."

"The smarter the politician, the more things he believes and the less he believes any of them."

"The state ? or, to make matters more concrete, 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. Their principal device to that end is to search out groups who pant and pine for something they can?t get, and to promise to give it to them. Nine times out of ten that promise is worth nothing. The tenth time it is made good by looting ?A? to satisfy ?B?. In other words, government is a broker in pillage, and every election is a sort of advanced auction on stolen goods."

"The theory seems to be that as long as a man is a failure he is one of God's children, but that as soon as he succeeds he is taken over by the Devil."

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

"The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all."

"The true function of art is to criticize, embellish and edit nature? the artist is a sort of impassioned proof-reader, blue penciling the bad spelling of God."

"The truth is that Christian theology, like every other theology, is not only opposed to the scientific spirit; it is also opposed to all other attempts at rational thinking. Not by accident does Genesis 3 make the father of knowledge a serpent - slimy, sneaking and abominable. Since the earliest days the church, as an organization, has thrown itself violently against every effort to liberate the body and mind of man. It has been, at all times and everywhere, the habitual and incorrigible defender of bad governments, bad laws, bad social theories, bad institutions. It was, for centuries, an apologist for slavery, as it was the apologist for the divine right of kings."

"The truth, indeed, is something that mankind, for some mysterious reason, instinctively dislikes. Every man who tries to tell it is unpopular, and even when, by the sheer strength of his case, he prevails, he is put down as a scoundrel."

"The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule."

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

"The value the world sets upon motives is often grossly unjust and inaccurate. Consider, for example, two of them: mere insatiable curiosity and the desire to do good. The latter is put high above the former, and yet it is the former that moves one of the most useful men the human race has yet produced: the scientific investigator. What actually urges him on is not some brummagem idea of Service, but a boundless, almost pathological thirst to penetrate the unknown, to uncover the secret, to find out what has not been found out before. His prototype is not the liberator releasing slaves, the good Samaritan lifting up the fallen, but a dog sniffing tremendously at an infinite series of rat-holes."

"The verdict of a jury is the a priori opinion of that juror who smokes the worst cigars."

"The virulence of the national appetite for bogus revelation."

"The war on privilege will never end. Its next great campaign will be against the special privileges of the underprivileged."

"The way to deal with superstition is not to be polite to it, but to tackle it with all arms, and so rout it, cripple it, and make it forever infamous and ridiculous. Is it, perchance, cherished by persons who should know better? Then their folly should be brought out into the light of day, and exhibited there in all its hideousness until they flee from it, hiding their heads in shame. True enough, even a superstitious man has certain inalienable rights. He has a right to harbor and indulge his imbecilities as long as he pleases, provided only he does not try to inflict them upon other men by force. He has a right to argue for them as eloquently as he can, in season and out of season. He has a right to teach them to his children. But certainly he has no right to be protected against the free criticism of those who do not hold them. He has no right to demand that they be treated as sacred. He has no right to preach them without challenge."

"The woman who is not pursued sets up the doctrine that pursuit is offensive to her sex, and wants to make it a felony. No genuinely attractive woman has any such desire. She likes masculine admiration, however violently expressed, and is quite able to take care of herself. More, she is well aware that very few men are bold enough to offer it without a plain invitation, and this awareness makes her extremely cynical of all women who complain of being harassed, beset, storied, and seduced. All the more intelligent women that I know, indeed, are unanimously of the opinion that no girl in her right senses has ever been actually seduced since the world began;"

"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."

"The worshiper is the father of the gods."

"The worst government is often 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."

"The worst man hesitates when choosing a mother for his children. And hesitating, he is lost."

"The worst of marriage is that it makes a woman believe that all other men are just as easy to fool."

"Theology: An effort to explain the unknowable by putting it into terms of the not worth knowing."

"There are men so philosophical that they can see humor in their own toothaches. But there has never lived a man so philosophical that he could see the toothache in his own humor."

"There are no dull subjects. There are only dull writers."

"There are no institutions in America: there are only fashions."

"There are now only two classes of men in the United States: those who work for their livings, and those who vote for them."

"There are people who read too much: the bibliobibuli. I know some who are constantly drunk on books, as other men are drunk on whiskey or religion. They wander through this most diverting and stimulating of worlds in a haze, seeing nothing and hearing nothing."

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

"There comes a time when a man must spit on his hands, hoist the black flag and begin slitting throats."

"There is a saying in Baltimore that crabs may be prepared in fifty ways and that all of them are good."

"There is always an easy solution to every human problem?neat, plausible, and wrong."

"There is in writing the constant joy of sudden discovery, of happy accident."

"Those who can -- do. Those who can't -- teach."

"Time stays, we go."