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| The natural tendency of every government is to grow steadily worse - that is, to grow more satisfactory to those who constitute it and less satisfactory to those who support it | | Uncategorized | |
| The notion that artists flourish upon adversity and misunderstanding, that they are able to function to the utmost in an atmosphere of indifference or hostility - this notion is nine-tenths nonsense | | Uncategorized | |
| The objection of the scandalmonger is not that she tells of racy doings, but that she pretends to be indignant about them | | Uncategorized | |
| The objection to Puritans is not that they try to make us think as they do, but that they try to make us do as they think | | Uncategorized | |
| The older I get the more I admire and crave competence, just simple competence, in any field from adultery to zoology. | | Uncategorized | |
| The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom. | | Age; Wisdom | |
| 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. | | Fear | |
| The only kind of freedom that the mob can imagine is freedom to annoy and oppress its betters, and that is precisely the kind that we mainly have | | Freedom | |
| The only really happy folk are married women and single men. | | Uncategorized | |
The only way to success in American public life lies in flattering and kowtowing
to the mob. | | Uncategorized | |
| The penalty for laughing in a courtroom is six months in jail; if it were not for this penalty, the jury would never hear the evidence. | | Laughter | |
| The plain truth is that I am not a fair man, and don't want to hear both sides | | Uncategorized | |
| The practical politician, as every connoisseur of ochlocracy knows, is not a man who seeks to inoculate the innumerable caravan of voters with new ideas; he is a man who seeks to search out and prick into energy the basic ideas that are already in th | | Politicians | |
| The proof of an idea is not to be sought in the soundness of the man fathering it, but in the soundness of the idea itself. One asks of a pudding, not if the cook who offers it is a good woman, but if the pudding itself is good. | | Uncategorized | |
| The prophesying business is like writing fugues; it is fatal to every one save the man of absolute genius | | Business | |
| The smallest atom of truth represents some man's bitter toil and agony; for every ponderable chunk of it there is a brave truth-seeker's grave upon some lonely ash-heap and a soul roasting in hell | | Mankind; Truth | |
| The surest way to get on in politics in America is to play the leading part in a prosecution which attracts public notice | | Government | |
| The theory seems to be that as long as a man is a failure he is one of God's children, but that as soon as he succeeds he is taken over by the Devil. | | Failure; Religion; Theory | |
| The thing which sets off the American from all other men, and gives peculiar color not only to the pattern of his daily life but also adds to the play of his inner ideas, is what, for want of a more exact term, may be called social aspiration | | Uncategorized | |
| The trouble with Communism is the Communists, just as the trouble with Christianity is the Christians | | Uncategorized | |
