The opera is to music what a bawdy house is to a cathedral.

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.

The only really happy folk are married women and single men.

We are here and it is now. Further than that, all human knowledge is moonshine.

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.

If women believed in their husbands they would be a good deal happier and also a good deal more foolish.

All government, of course, is against liberty.

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.

In war the heroes always outnumber the soldiers ten to one.

Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.

Every man sees in his relatives, and especially in his cousins, a series of grotesque caricatures of himself.

The chief value of money lies in the fact that one lives in a world in which it is overestimated.

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.

We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart.

God is a comedian, playing to an audience too afraid to laugh.

I believe that it is better to tell the truth than a lie. I believe it is better to be free than to be a slave. And I believe it is better to know than to be ignorant.

Bachelors know more about women than married men; if they didn't they'd be married too.

Communism, like any other revealed religion, is largely made up of prophecies.

War will never cease until babies begin to come into the world with larger cerebrums and smaller adrenal glands.

Women always excel men in that sort of wisdom which comes from experience. To be a woman is in itself a terrible experience.

Women have simple tastes. They get pleasure out of the conversation of children in arms and men in love.

The worst government is often the most moral. One composed of cynics is often very tolerant and humane. But when fanatics are on top there is no limit to oppression.

A national political campaign is better than the best circus ever heard of, with a mass baptism and a couple of hangings thrown in.

All men are frauds. The only difference between them is that some admit it. I myself deny it.

Legend: A lie that has attained the dignity of age.

Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage.

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.

Whenever a husband and wife begin to discuss their marriage they are giving evidence at a coroner's inquest.

It is impossible to imagine the universe run by a wise, just and omnipotent God, but it is quite easy to imagine it run by a board of gods.

It is not materialism that is the chief curse of the world, as pastors teach, but idealism. Men get into trouble by taking their visions and hallucinations too seriously.

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

Honor is simply the morality of superior men.

A society made up of individuals who were all capable of original thought would probably be unendurable.

Strike an average between what a woman thinks of her husband a month before she marries him and what she thinks of him a year afterward, and you will have the truth about him.

Each party steals so many articles of faith from the other, and the candidates spend so much time making each other's speeches, that by the time election day is past there is nothing much to do save turn the sitting rascals out and let a new gang in.

Strike an average between what a woman thinks of her husband a month before she marries him and what she thinks of him a year afterward, and you will have the truth about him.

When women kiss it always reminds one of prize fighters shaking hands.

Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.

Love is like war: easy to begin but very hard to stop.

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.

A professor must have a theory as a dog must have fleas.

Historian: an unsuccessful novelist.