Great Throughts Treasury

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

"To be a successful clergyman a man must be buttered on both sides."

"To believe that Russia has got rid of the evils of capitalism takes a special kind of mind. It is the same kind that believes that a Holy Roller has got rid of sin."

"To denounce moralizing out of hand is to pronounce a moral judgment."

"To fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence... Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim... is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States... and that is its aim everywhere else."

"To me the scientific point of view is completely satisfying, and it has been so as long as I can remember. Not once in this life have I ever been inclined to seek a rock and a refuge elsewhere. It leaves a good many dark spots in the universe, to be sure, but not a hundredth time as many as theology. We may trust it, soon or late, to throw light upon many of them, and those that remain dark will be beyond illumination by any other agency. It also fails on occasion to console, but so does theology..."

"To sum up: 1. The cosmos is a gigantic fly-wheel making 10,000 revolutions a minute. 2. Man is a sick fly taking a dizzy ride on it. 3. Religion is the theory that the wheel was designed and set spinning to give him the ride."

"To the man with an ear for verbal delicacies - the man who searches painfully for the perfect word, and puts the way of saying a thing above the thing said - there is in writing the constant joy of sudden discovery, of happy accident."

"To wage a war for a purely moral reason is as absurd as to ravish a woman for a purely moral reason."

"Today every such man knows that the laws which prevail in the universe, whatever their origin in some remote and incomprehensible First Purpose, manifest themselves in complete impersonality, and that no representation to any superhuman Power, however imagined, can change their operation in the slightest. He knows that when they seem arbitrary and irrational it is not because omnipotent and inscrutable Presences are playing with them, as a child might play with building blocks; but because the human race is yet too ignorant to penetrate to their true workings. The whole history of progress, as the modern mind sees it, is a history of such penetrations. ... Each in its turn has narrowed the dominion and prerogative of the gods."

"Tombstone: An ugly reminder of one who has been forgotten."

"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. Did Darrow, in the course of his dreadful bombardment of Bryan, drop a few shells, incidentally, into measurably cleaner camps? Then let the garrisons of those camps look to their defenses. They are free to shoot back. But they can't disarm their enemy."

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

"Truth: Something somehow discreditable to someone."

"Two avenues of approach to these rewards lie open to the ambitious fictioneer. On the one hand, he may throw all intelligible standards of merit to the winds, and devote himself to new manufacturing que stories are frankly bad, trusting to collegues nine persons out of ten are utterly devoid of esthetic sense and HENCE unable to tell the bad from the good. And on the other hand, he may take stories, or parts of stories have been told before que, que or, in Themselves, are scarcely worth the telling, and so encrust Them with the ornaments of wit, of shrewd observation, of human sympathy and of style - in brief, so develop Them - that readers of good taste will forget the unsoundness of the stuff in admiration of the ingenious and workmanlike way in Which it is handled."

"Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to prove that the other party is unfit to rule-- and both commonly succeed, and are right. The United States has never developed an aristocracy really disinterested or an intelligentsia really intelligent. Its history is simply a record of vacillations between two gangs of frauds."

"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... The United States has never developed an aristocracy really disinterested or an intelligentsia really intelligent. Its history is simply a record of vacillations between two gangs of frauds."

"Unquestionably, there is progress. The average American now pays out twice as much in taxes as he formerly got in wages."

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

"We are, in fact, a nation of evangelists; every third American devotes himself to improving and lifting up his fellow-citizens, usually by force; the messianic delusion is our national disease."

"We must be willing to pay a price for freedom."

"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."

"Wealth: Any income that is at least $100 more a year than the income of one's wife's sister's husband."

"What I admire most in any man is a serene spirit, a steady freedom from moral indignation, an all-embracing tolerance... when he fights he fights in the manner of a gentleman fighting a duel, not in that of a longshoreman cleaning out a waterfront saloon. That is to say, he carefully guards his amour-prope by assuming that his opponent is as decent a man as he is, and just as honest - and perhaps, after all, right."

"What is any political campaign save a concerted effort to turn out a set of politicians who are admittedly bad and put in a set who are thought to be better. The former assumption, I believe is always sound; the latter is just as certainly false. For if experience teaches us anything at all it teaches us this: that a good politician, under democracy, is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar."

"What makes philosophy so tedious is not the profundity of philosophers, but their lack of art; they are like physicians who sought to cure a slight hyperacidity by prescribing a carload of burned oyster-shells."

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

"What the meaning of human life may be I don't know: I incline to suspect that it has none."

"What the South really needs is fewer scrub bulls ? on the human level."

"When A annoys or injures B on the pretense of saving or improving X, A is a scoundrel."

"When a husband's story is believed, he begins to suspect his wife."

"When a man laughs at his troubles he loses a good many friends. They never forgive the loss of their prerogative."

"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."

"When a woman says she won't, it is a good sign that she will. And when she says she will it is an even better sign."

"When difficulties confront him he no longer blames them upon the inscrutable enmity of remote and ineffable powers; he blames them upon his own ignorance and incompetence. And when he sets out to remedy that ignorance and to remove that incompetence he does not look to any such powers for light and leading; he puts his whole trust in his own enterprise and ingenuity. Not infrequently he overestimates his capacities and comes to grief, but his failures, at worst, are much fewer than the failures of his fathers. Does pestilence, on occasion, still baffle his medicine? Then it is surely less often than the pestilences of old baffled sacrifice and prayer. Does war remain to shame him before the bees, and wasteful and witless government to make him blush when he contemplates the ants? Then war at its most furious is still less cruel than Hell, and the harshest statutes ever devised by man have more equity and benevolence in them than the irrational and appalling jurisprudence of the Christian God."

"When I die I shall be content to vanish into nothingness... No show, however good, could conceivably be good forever... I do not believe in immortality, and have no desire for it."

"When somebody says it?s not about the money, it?s about the money."

"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."

"When you sympathize with a married woman you either make two enemies or gain one for life and one friend."

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

"Whenever a woman begins to talk of anything, she is talking to, of, or at a man."

"Whenever you hear a man speak of his love for his country it is a sign that he expects to be paid for it."

"Why assume so glibly that the God who presumably created the universe is still running it? It is certainly perfectly conceivable that He may have finished it and then turned it over to lesser gods to operate. In the same way many human institutions are turned over to grossly inferior men. This is true, for example, of most universities, and of all great newspapers."

"Women always excel man in that sort of wisdom which comes from experience. To be a woman is in itself a terrible experience."

"Wife: a former sweetheart."

"Wife: one who is sorry she did it, but would undoubtedly do it again."

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

"Women do not like timid man. Cats do not like prudent rats."

"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 practice a magic inherited from savagery, but simply and solely because they have sense. They see at a glance why most men could not see with searchlights and telescopes... They are the supreme realists of the race."

"Women usually enjoy annoying their husbands, but not when they annoy them by growing fat."