Great Throughts Treasury

"The ideal government… is one which lets the individual alone one which barely escapes being no government at all. "

"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. "

"The whole drift of our law is toward the absolute prohibition of all ideas that diverge in the slightest from the accepted platitudes, and behind that drift or law there is far more potent force of growing custom, and under that custom there is a national philosophy which erects conformity into the noblest of virtues and the free functioning of personality into a capital crime against society. "

"The press is seldom intelligent, save in the arts of the mob-master. It is never courageously honest. Held harshly to a rigid correctness of opinion by the plutocracy that controls it with less and less attempt to disguise, and menaced on all sides by censorships that dare not flout, it sinks rapidly into formalism and feebleness. Its yellow section is perhaps its most respectable section for there the only vestige of the old free journalism survives."

"Complex problems have simple, easy to understand wrong answers. (also cited as Grossman's Law)"

"Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority. The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong. All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men who have whooped them up and tried to enforce them. The truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant, in this field as in all others. His culture is based on "I am not too sure.""

"An author, like any other so-called artist, is a man in whom the normal vanity of all men is so vastly exaggerated that he finds it a sheer impossibility to hold it in. His over-powering impulse is to gyrate before his fellow men, flapping his wings and emitting defiant yells. This being forbidden by the police of all civilized nations, he takes it out by putting his yells on paper. Such is the thing called self-expression."

"A bachelor is one who wants a wife, but is glad he hasn't got her."

"A bad man is the sort who weeps every time he speaks of a good woman."

"A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin."

"A demagogue's mind is a beautiful mechanism. It can think anything he asks it to think."

"A devotee on her knees in some abysmal and mysterious cathedral, the while solemn music sounds, and clouds of incense come down the wind, and priests in luxurious, operatic costumes busy themselves with stately ceremonials in a dead and not too respectable language ? this is unquestionably beautiful, particularly if the devotee herself be sightly. But the same devotee aroused to hysterical protestations of faith by the shrieks and contortions of a Methodist dervish in the costume of a southern member of Congress, her knees trembling with the fear of God, her hands clenched as if to do combat with Beelzebub, her lips discharging hosannas and hallelujahs ? this is merely obscene."

"A fool who, after plain warning, persists in dosing himself with dangerous drugs should be free to do so, for his death is a benefit to the race in general."

"A celebrity is one who is known to many persons he is glad he doesn't know."

"A church is a place in which gentlemen who have never been to heaven brag about it to persons who will never get there."

"A gentleman is one who never strikes a woman without provocation."

"A good politician is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar."

"A home is not a mere transient shelter: its essence lies in the personalities of the people who live in it."

"A judge is a law student who marks his own examination papers."

"A man always blames the woman who fools him. In the same way he blames the door he walks into in the dark."

"A man always remembers his first love with special tenderness, but after that he begins to bunch them."

"A man loses his sense of direction after four drinks; a woman loses hers after four kisses."

"A man may be a fool and not know it ? but not if he is married."

"A man may be truly religious without imagining God as good at all, and he may be good without believing that there is any moral order in the universe or even that God exists. Religion does not necessarily make men better citizens, whether of their neighborhoods or of the world."

"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."

"A metaphysician is one who believes it when toxins from a dilapidated liver makes his brain whisper that mind is the boss of liver"

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

"A newspaper is a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier."

"A normal woman, indeed, no more believes in democracy in the nation than she believes in democracy at her own fireside; she knows that there must be a class to order and a class to obey, and that the two can never coalesce. Nor is she, susceptible to the stock sentimentalities upon which the whole democratic process is based. This was shown very dramatically in them United States at the national election of 1920, in which the late Woodrow Wilson was brought down to colossal and ignominious defeat?The first general election in which all American women could vote. All the sentimentality of the situation was on the side of Wilson, and yet fully three-fourths of the newly-enfranchised women voters voted against him."

"A poet more than thirty years old is simply an overgrown child."

"A politician is an animal which can sit on a fence and yet keep both ears to the ground."

"A professional politician is a professionally dishonorable man. In order to get anywhere near high office he has to make so many compromises and submit to so many humiliations that he becomes indistinguishable from a streetwalker."

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

"A prohibitionist is the sort of man one couldn't care to drink with, even if he drank."

"A Puritan is a person who lives in the fear that someone, somewhere, may be having a good time."

"A Puritan is not against bullfighting because of the pain it gives the bull, but because of the pleasure it gives the spectators."

"A sob is a sound made by women, babies, tenors, clergyman, actors, and drunken men."

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

"A Sunday school is a prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents."

"A woman, if she hates her husband (and many of them do), can make life so sour and obnoxious to him that even death upon the gallows seems sweet by comparison. This hatred, of course, is often, and perhaps almost invariably, quite justified. To be the wife of an ordinary man, indeed, is an experience that must be very hard to bear. The hollowness and vanity of the fellow, his petty meanness and stupidity, his puling sentimentality and credulity, his bombastic air of a cock on a dunghill, his anaesthesia to all whispers and summonings of the spirit, above all, his loathsome clumsiness in amour?all these things must revolt any woman above the lowest."

"Adultery is the application of democracy to love."

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

"Alimony - the ransom that the happy pay to the devil."

"All [zoos] actually offer to the public in return for the taxes spent upon them is a form of idle and witless amusement, compared to which a visit to a penitentiary, or even to a State legislature in session, is informing, stimulating and ennobling."

"All government, in its essence, is a conspiracy against the superior man: its one permanent object is to oppress him and cripple him. If it be aristocratic in organization, then it seeks to protect the man who is superior only in law against the man who is superior in fact; if it be democratic, then it seeks to protect the man who is inferior in every way against both. One of its primary functions is to regiment men by force, to make them as much alike as possible and as dependent upon one another as possible, to search out and combat originality among them. All it can see in an original idea is potential change, and hence an invasion of its prerogatives. 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 inevitably 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 even if he is not romantic personally he is very apt to spread discontent among those who are."

"All government, of course, is against liberty."

"All professional politicians are dedicated wholeheartedly to waste and corruption. They are the enemies of every decent man."

"All that the YMCA's horse and rings really accomplished was to fill me with an ineradicable distaste, not only for Christian endeavor in all its forms, but also for every variety of calisthenics, so that I still begrudge the trifling exertion needs to climb in and out of the bathtub, and hate all sports as rabidly as a person who likes sports hates common sense."

"All women, soon or late, are jealous of their daughters; all men, sooner or later, are envious of their sons."

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