Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule—and both commonly succeed, and are right.

A philosopher is a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat that isn’t there. A theologian is the man who finds it.

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

…the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.

We are, in fact, a nation of evangelists; every third American devotes himself to improving and lifting up his fellow-citizens, usually by force; the messianic delusion is our national disease.

The essence of science is that it is always willing to abandon a given idea for a better one; the essence of theology is that it holds its truths to be eternal and immutable.

The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it. Power is what all messiahs really seek: not the chance to serve. This is true even of the...

American journalism (like the journalism of any other country) is predominantly paltry and worthless. Its pretensions are enormous, but its achievements are insignificant.

The most erroneous assumption is to the effect that the aim of public education is to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence, and so make them fit to discharge...

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

Immortality is the condition of a dead man who doesn’t believe he is dead.

Happiness is the china shop; love is the bull.

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.

I believe that liberty is the only genuinely valuable thing that men have invented, at least in the field of government, in a thousand years. I believe that it is better to be free than...

When somebody says it’s not about the money, it’s about the money.

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

The trouble with Communism is the Communists, just as the trouble with Christianity is the Christians.

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

The notion that a radical is one who hates his country is naïve and usually idiotic. He is, more likely, one who likes his country more than the rest of us, and is thus more...

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

It seems to be difficult if not impossible for human beings to avoid thinking of government as mystical entity with a nature and a history all its own. It constitutes for them a creature somehow...

I believe in only one thing: liberty; but I do not believe in liberty enough to want to force it upon anyone.

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

After all, all he did was string together a lot of old, well-known quotations.

Equality before the law is probably forever unattainable. It is a noble ideal, but it can never be realized, for what men value in this world is not rights but privileges.

Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing.

Race relations never improve in war time; they always worsen. And it is when the boys come home the Ku Klux Klans are organized. I believe with George Schuyler that the only really feasible way...

The Jews could be put down very plausible as the most unpleasant race ever heard of. As commonly encountered they lack any of the qualities that mark the civilized man: courage, dignity, incorruptibility, ease, confidence....

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

When a candidate for public office faces the voters he does not face men of sense; he faces a mob of men whose chief distinguishing mark is the fact that they are quite incapable of...

In brief, the teaching process, as commonly observed, has nothing to do with the investigation and establishment of facts, assuming that actual facts may ever be determined. Its sole purpose is to cram the pupils,...

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

A man’s women folk, whatever their outward show of respect for his merit and authority, always regard him secretly as an ass, and with something akin to pity. His most gaudy sayings and doings seldom...

Whenever a woman begins to talk of anything, she is talking to, of, or at a man.

One of the most irrational of all the conventions of modern society is the one to the effect that religious opinions should be respected. …[This] convention protects them, and so they proceed with their blather...

Injustice is relativelyl easy to bear; what stings is justice.

New York: A third-rate Babylon.

In the present case it is a little inaccurate to say I hate everything. I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible to any public...

The great artists of the world are never Puritans, and seldom even ordinarily respectable.

Nietzsche, an infinitely harder and more courageous intellect, was incapable of any such confusion of ideas; he seldom allowed sentimentality to turn him from the glaring fact.

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.

Government today is growing too strong to be safe. There are no longer any citizens in the world there are only subjects. They work day in and day out for their masters they are bound...

In the superman Nietzsche gave the world a conceivable and possible goal for all human effort. But there still remained a problem and it was this: When the superman at last appears on earth, what...

Before one may scare the plain people one must first have a firm understanding of the bugaboos that most facilely alarm them. One must study the schemes that have served to do it in the...

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...

Every great wave of popular passion that rolls up on the prairies is dashed to spray when it strikes the hard rocks of Manhattan.

Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance. No one in this world, so far as I know—and I have researched the records for years, and employed agents to help me—has...

Off goes the head of the king, and tyranny gives way to freedom. The change seems abysmal. Then, bit by bit, the face of freedom hardens, and by and by it is the old face...

The value the world sets upon motives is often grossly unjust and inaccurate. Consider, for example, two of them: mere insatiable curiosity and the desire to do good. The latter is put high above the...

If, after I depart this vale, you ever remember me and have thought to please my ghost, forgive some sinner and wink your eye at some homely girl.