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.
No one in this world, so far as I know - and I have searched 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.
God is a comedian, playing to an audience too afraid to laugh.
A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin.
There is always an easy solution to every problem - neat, plausible, and wrong.
Love is the delusion that one woman differs from another.
The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.
An idealist is one who, on noticing that roses smell better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup.
The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out... without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane, intolerable.
If a politician found he had cannibals among his constituents, he would promise them missionaries for dinner.
The one permanent emotion of the inferior man is fear - fear of the unknown, the complex, the inexplicable. What he wants above everything else is safety.
Historian: an unsuccessful novelist.
It is inaccurate to say that I hate everything. I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty, and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible for public office.
It doesn't take a majority to make a rebellion; it takes only a few determined leaders and a sound cause.
The only really happy folk are married women and single men.
Conscience is the inner voice that warns us that someone might be looking.
Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.
It is even harder for the average ape to believe that he has descended from man.
Immorality: the morality of those who are having a better time.
The most costly of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind.
