Great Throughts Treasury

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

"Maugham's success, in fact, lies a good deal less in what he positively does than in what he discreetly leaves undone. He gets the colors of life into his Charles Strickland, not by playing a powerful beam of light upon him, but by leaving him a bit out of focus--by constantly insisting, in the midst of every discussion of him, upon his pervasive mystery--in brief, by craftily making him appear, not as a commonplace, simple and completely understandable man, but as the half comprehended enigma that every genuine man of genius seems to all of us when we meet him in real life."

"Men are the only animal that devote themselves, they can and day out, to making one another unhappy. It is an art like any other. Its virtuosi are called altruists"

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

"Metaphysics is almost always an attempt to prove the incredible by an appeal to the unintelligible."

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

"Monogamy, in brief, kills passion -- and passion is the most dangerous of all the surviving enemies to what we call civilization, which is based upon order, decorum, restraint, formality, industry, regimentation. The civilized man -- the ideal civilized man -- is simply one who never sacrifices the common security to his private passions. He reaches perfection when he even ceases to love passionately -- when he reduces the most profound of all his instinctive experiences from the level of an ecstasy to the level of a mere device for replenishing the armies and workshops of the world, keeping clothes in repair, reducing the infant death-rate, providing enough tenants for every landlord, and making it possible for the Polizei to know where every citizen is at any hour of the day or night. Monogamy accomplishes this, not by producing satiety, but by destroying appetite. It makes passion formal and uninspiring, and so gradually kills it."

"Morality and honor are not to be confused. 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."

"Morality is the theory that every human act must be either right or wrong, and that 99 % of them are wrong."

"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."

"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."

"My belief is that happiness is necessarily transient. The natural state of a reflective man is one of depression. The world is a botch. Women can make men perfectly happy, but they seldom know how to do it. They make too much effort: they overlook the powerful effect of simple amiability. Women are also the cause of the worst kind of unhappiness."

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

"Nature abhors a moron."

"Nevertheless, it is even harder for the average ape to believe that he has descended from man."

"New York: A third-rate Babylon."

"No government as such is ever in favor of the freedom of the individual. It invariably seeks to limit that freedom, if not by overt denial, then by seeking constantly to widen its own functions."

"No government is ever really in favor of so-called civil rights. It always tries to whittle them down. They are preserved under all governments, insofar as they survive at all, by special classes of fanatics, often highly dubious."

"No government, of its own motion, will increase its own weakness, for that would mean to acquiesce in its own destruction... governments, whatever their pretensions otherwise, try to preserve themselves by holding the individual down ... Government itself, indeed, may be reasonably defined as a conspiracy against him. It?s one permanent aim, whatever its form, is to hobble him sufficiently to maintain itself."

"No man is ever too old to look at a woman, and no woman is ever too fat to hope that he will look."

"No man of genuinely superior intelligence has ever been an actor. Even supposing a young man of appreciable mental powers to be lured upon the stage, as philosophers are occasionally lured into bordellos, his mind would be inevitably and almost immediately destroyed by the gaudy nonsense issuing from his mouth every night."

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

"No matter how long he lives, no man ever becomes as wise as the average woman of forty-eight."

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

"No normal man ever fell in love after thirty when the kidneys begin to disintegrate."

"No one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public."

"No one in this world has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby."

"No one in this world, so far as I know - and I have researched the records for years, and employed agents to help me - has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby."

"No woman is really humble; she is merely politic. No woman, with a free choice before her, chooses self-immolation; the most she genuinely desires in that direction is a spectacular martyrdom. No woman delights in poverty. No woman yields when she can prevail. No woman is honestly meek."

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

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

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

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

"Of all escape mechanisms, death is the most efficient."

"Of all the classes of men, I dislike most those who make their livings by talking - actors, clergymen, politicians, pedagogues, and so on. All of them participate in the shallow false pretenses of the actor who is their archetype. It is almost impossible to imagine a talker who sticks to the facts. Carried away by the sound of his own voice and the applause of the groundlings, he makes inevitably the jump from logic to mere rhetoric."

"Off goes the head of the king and tyranny gives way to freedom. The change seems abysmal. Then, bit by bit, the face of freedom hardens, and by and by it is the old face of tyranny. Then another cycle, and another. But under the play of all these opposites there is something fundamental and permanent ? the basic delusion that men may be governed and yet be free."

"On Franklin D. Roosevelt: If he became convinced tomorrow that coming out for cannibalism would get him the votes he so sorely needs, he would begin fattening a missionary on the White House backyard come Wednesday."

"On one issue, at least, men and women agree: they both distrust women."

"On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron."

"On William Shakespeare: After all, all he did was string together a lot of old, well-known quotations."

"One horse-laugh is worth ten-thousand syllogisms."

"One may no more live in the world without picking up the moral prejudices of the world than one will be able to go to hell without perspiring."

"One of the most irrational of all the conventions of modern society is the one to the effect that religious opinions should be respected? This convention protects them, and so they proceed with their blather unwhipped and almost unmolested, to the great damage of common sense and common decency. That they should have this immunity is an outrage. There is nothing in religious ideas, as a class, to lift them above other ideas. On the contrary, they are always dubious and often quite silly. Nor is there any visible intellectual dignity in theologians. Few of them know anything that is worth knowing, and not many of them are even honest."

"One seldom discovers a true believer that is worth knowing."

"Opera in English, is about as sensible as baseball in Italian."

"Optimist: The sort of man who marries his sisters best friend."

"Osteopath: One who argues that all human ills are caused by the pressure of hard bone upon soft tissue. The proof of his theory is to be found in the heads of those who believe it."

"Pastor: One employed by the wicked to prove to them by his example that virtue doesn't pay."

"Pathology would remain a lovely science, even if there were no therapeutics, just as seismology is a lovely science, though no one knows how to stop earthquakes."

"Pensioner: A kept patriot."