Character in decay is the theme of the great bulk of superior fiction.
We must be willing to pay a price for freedom.
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.
What men value in the world is not rights but privileges.
Love is like war: easy to begin but very hard to stop.
Conscience is a mother-in-law whose visit never ends.
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.
God is a comedian whose audience is afraid to laugh.
Nothing can come out of an artist that is not in the man.
Women have simple tastes. They get pleasure out of the conversation of children in arms and men in love.
Puritanism. The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.
A good politician is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar.
The one permanent emotion of the inferior man is fear-fear of the unknown the complex the inexplicable. What he wants beyond everything else is safety.
Time is a great legalizer even in the field of morals.
Penetrating so many secrets we cease to believe in the unknowable. But there it sits nevertheless calmly licking its chops.
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.
A national political campaign is better than the best circus ever heard of, with a mass baptism and a couple of hangings thrown in.
Hope: A pathological belief in the occurrence of the impossible.
Giving every man a vote has no more made men wise and free than Christianity has made them good.
Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage.