The American Republic, the envy and despair of all other nations |
The American, in other words, thinks that the sinner has no rights that any one is bound to respect, and he is prone to mistake an unsupported charge of sinning, provided it be made violently enough, for actual proof and confession |
The argument that capital punishment degrades the state is moonshine, for if that were true then it would degrade the state to send men to war... The state, in truth, is degraded in its very nature: a few butcheries cannot do it any further damage. |
The average man does not get pleasure out of an idea because he thinks it is true; he thinks it is true because he gets pleasure out of it |
The average man doesn't want to be free. He wants to be safe. |
The average newspaper, especially of the better sort, has the intelligence of a hillbilly evangelist, the courage of a rat, the fairness of a prohibitionist boob-jumper, the information of a high-school janitor, the taste of a designer of celluloid v |
The average schoolmaster is, and always must be, an ass |
The basic fact about human existence is not that it is a tragedy, but that it is a bore. It is not so much a war as an endless standing in line. |
The best years are the forties; after fifty a man begins to deteriorate, but in the forties he is at the maximum of his villainy. |
The capacity of human beings to bore one another seems to be vastly greater than that of any other animal. |
The central difficulty lies in the fact that all of the sciences have made such great progress during the last century that they have got quite beyond the reach of man |
The chief knowledge that a man gets from reading books is the knowledge that very few of them are worth reading |
The chief value of money lies in the fact that one lives in a world in which it is overestimated. |
The comfortable estate of widowhood is the only hope that keeps up a wife's spirits. |
The common argument that crime is caused by poverty is a kind of slander on the poor |