Great Throughts Treasury

"Is it progress if a cannibal uses knife and fork?"

"The face of the enemy frightens me only when I see how much it resembles mine."

"You have to have a lot of patience to learn patience."

"A sodomite got very excited looking at a zoology text. Does this make it pornography?"

"An apt aphorism half kills, half immortalizes."

"Advice to writers Sometimes you just have to stop writing. Even before you begin."

"A dream will always triumph over reality, once it is given the chance."

"All is in the hands of man. Therefore wash them often."

"An empty envelope that is sealed contains a secret."

"Are there any vegetarians among cannibals?"

"At the beginning there was the Word - at the end just the Cliché."

"Believers believe in resurrection, atheists only in comebacks."

"Beyond each corner new directions lie in wait."

"Burning stakes do not lighten the darkness."

"Do not ask God for the way to heaven; He will show you the hardest one."

"Cannibals prefer those who have no spines."

"Do not trust people. They are capable of greatness."

"Create your own myths; that is how the gods got started."

"Do not expect too much of the end of the world."

"Don't shout for help at night, you may wake your neighbors."

"Each snowflake in an avalanche pleads not guilty."

"Even the masochists tell everything when tortured. From sheer gratitude."

"Even his ignorance is encyclopedic."

"Even a glass eye can see its blindness."

"Don't trust the heart, it wants your blood."

"Every stink that fights the ventilator thinks it is Don Quixote."

"Everything is illusion. Even that last sentence."

"Even the voice of conscience undergoes mutation."

"Faith is, at one and the same time, absolutely necessary and altogether impossible."

"Every now and then you meet a man whose ignorance is encyclopedic."

"First of all, I choose the great roles, and if none of these come, I choose the mediocre ones, and if they don't come, I choose the ones that pay the rent."

"He who has no conscience makes up for it by lacking it."

"I am against using death as a punishment. I am also against using it as a reward."

"Hay smells different to lovers and horses."

"He who limps is still walking."

"I give you bitter pills in sugar coating. The pills are harmless: the poison is in the sugar."

"I prefer the sign NO ENTRY to the one that says NO EXIT."

"I don't agree with mathematics; the sum total of zeros is a frightening figure."

"If a man who cannot count finds a four-leaf clover, is he entitled to happiness?"

"Illiterates have to dictate."

"If you are not a psychiatrist, stay away from idiots. They are too stupid to pay a layman for his company."

"In a war of ideas it is people who get killed."

"Intelligence, in diapers, is invisible. And when it matures, out the window it flies. We have to pounce on it earlier."

"Impartiality is not neutrality. It is partiality for justice."

"It's the priests who have demands, not the gods."

"Legends are often destroyed by those in need of its stuff."

"Mankind deserves sacrifice - but not of mankind."

"Many a zero thinks it is the ellipse on which the Earth travels."

"Men have slow reflexes. In general it takes several generations later for them to understand."

"Morality is either a social contract or you have to pay cash"