Great Throughts Treasury

"Democracy tries an endless succession of arcana as a movie gal tries an endless series of husbands, hoping against hope for one who is sober, self-supporting, faithful, and not too watchful."

"Dispatch from Reno ? The rich leap from the bed to the altar; the poor leap from the altar to the bed."

"Don?t overestimate the decency of the human race."

"During many a single week, I daresay, more money is spent in New York upon useless and evil things than would suffice to run the kingdom of Denmark for a year."

"Each party steals so many articles of faith from the other, and the candidates spend so much time making each other's speeches, that by the time election day is past there is nothing much to do save turn the sitting rascals out and let a new gang in."

"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 are not rights but privileges."

"Eugenics is the theory that charm in a woman is the same as charmed in a prize-fighter."

"Every bachelor is a hero to some married woman."

"Every contribution to human progress on record has been made by some individual who differed sharply from the general, and was thus, almost, superior to the general. Perhaps the palpably insane must be excepted here, but I can think of no others. Such exceptional individuals should be permitted, it seems to me, to enjoy every advantage that goes with their superiority... The rest are as negligible as the race of cockroaches, who have gone unchanged for a million years."

"Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under."

"Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods."

"Every failure teaches a man something, to wit, that he will probably fail again next time."

"Every man is his own hell."

"Every man is thoroughly happy twice in his life: just after he has met his first love, and just after he has left his last one."

"Every man sees in his relatives, and especially in his cousins, a series of grotesque caricatures of himself."

"Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin to slit throats."

"Evil is that which one believes of others. It is a sin to believe evil of others, but it is seldom a mistake."

"Explanations exist; they have existed for all time; there is always a well-known solution to every human problem - neat, plausible, and wrong."

"Fame: An embalmer trembling with stage fright."

"Fine: A bribe paid by a rich man to escape the lawful penalty of his crime. In China such bribes are paid to the judge personally; in America they are paid to him as agent for the public. But it makes no difference to the men who pay them ? nor to the men who can't pay them."

"Firmness in decision is often merely a form of stupidity. It indicates an inability to think the same thing out twice."

"First stanza: Millions now living will never die. Second stanza: No more war."

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

"For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong."

"For every problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong."

"For every subtle and complicated question, there is a perfectly simple and straightforward answer, which is wrong."

"For it is mutual trust, even more than mutual interest that holds human associations together. Our friends seldom profit us but they make us feel safe... Marriage is a scheme to accomplish exactly that same end."

"Friendship is a common belief in the same fallacies, mountebanks, and hobgoblins."

"Genius: the ability to prolong one's childhood."

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

"God is the immemorial refuge of the incompetent, the helpless, the miserable. They find not only sanctuary in His arms, but also a kind of superiority, soothing to their macerated egos: He will set them above their betters."

"God must love the poor, said Lincoln, or he wouldn't have made so many of them. He must love the rich, or he wouldn't divide so much mazuma among so few of them."

"Government today is growing too strong to be safe. There are no longer any citizens in the world there are only subjects. They work day in and day out for their masters they are bound to die for their masters at call. Out of this working and dying they tend to get less and less."

"Government, in its very essence, is opposed to all increase in knowledge. Its tendency is always towards permanence and against change... The progress of humanity, far from being the result of government, has been made entirely without its aid and in the face if its constant and bitter opposition."

"Hanging one scoundrel, it appears, does not deter the next. Well, what of it? The first one is at least disposed of."

"Happiness is peace after strife, the overcoming of difficulties, the feeling of security and well-being. The only really happy folk are married women and single men."

"Happiness is the china shop; love is the bull."

"Have you ever watched a crab on the shore crawling backward in search of the Atlantic Ocean, and missing? That's the way the mind of man operates."

"He marries best who puts it off until it is too late."

"He sees daily evidence that many things held to be true by nine-tenths of all men are, in reality, false, and he is thereby apt to acquire a doubt of everything, including his own beliefs."

"He writes the worst English that I have ever encountered. It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself out of the dark abysm of pish, and crawls insanely up the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash."

"Henry James would have been vastly improved as a novelist by a few whiffs of the Chicago stockyard."

"Here is something that the psychologists have so far neglected: the love of ugliness for its own sake, the lust to make the world intolerable. Its habitat is the United States. Out of the melting pot emerges a race which hates beauty as it hates truth."

"Historian: an unsuccessful novelist."

"Honor is simply the morality of superior men."

"Hope: A pathological belief in the occurrence of the impossible."

"How far the gentlemen of dark complexion will get with their independence, now that they have declared it, I don?t know. There are serious difficulties in their way. The vast majority of people of their race are but two or three inches removed from gorillas: it will be a sheer impossibility, for a long, long while, to interest them in anything above pork-chops and bootleg gin."

"How little it takes to make life unbearable... A pebble in the shoe, a cockroach in the spaghetti, a woman's laugh."

"Human life is basically a comedy. Even its tragedies often seem comic to the spectator, and not infrequently they actually have comic touches to the victim. Happiness probably consists largely in the capacity to detect and relish them. A man who can laugh, if only at himself, is never really miserable."

"Husbands never become good; they merely become proficient."