Only the shallow know themselves

An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup.

Conscience is a mother-in-law whose visit never ends

Conscience is the inner voice that warns us that someone might be looking

Democracy is the art of running the circus from the monkey cage

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

For every problem, there is one solution which is simple, neat and wrong.

I never lecture, not because I am shy or a bad speaker, but simply because I detest the sort of people who go to lectures and don't want to meet them.

I believe that all government is evil, and that trying to improve it is largely a waste of time.

Imagine the Creator as a low comedian, and at once the world becomes explicable.

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.

Legenda lie that has attained the dignity of age.

Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence

Most people want security in this world, not liberty

New York: A third-rate Babylon.

No matter how happily a woman may be married, it always pleases her to discover that there is a nice man who wishes that she were not.

Poetry is a comforting piece of fiction set to more or less lascivious music.

Puritanism - The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.

Self-respect: the secure feeling that no one, as yet, is suspicious.

The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.

The capacity of human beings to bore one another seems to be vastly greater than that of any other animal.

The kind of man who wants the government to adopt and enforce his ideas is always the kind of man whose ideas are idiotic.

The most dangerous man, to any government, is the man who is able to think things out for himself, without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost invariably he comes
to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane and intolerable, and so if he is romantic, he tries to change it. And if he is not romantic personally, he is apt to spread discontent among
those who are.

Unquestionably, there is progress. The average American now pays out twice as much in taxes as he formerly got in wages.

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 whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed [and hence clamorous to be led to safety] by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.