Great Throughts Treasury

"In the duel of sex, woman fights from a dreadnought and man from an open raft."

"In the long run all battles are lost, and so are all wars."

"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 office of trust or profit in the Republic."

"In the superman Nietzsche gave the world the conceivable and possible goal for all human effort. Remained there but still a problem and it was this: When the Superman Appears at last on earth, what then? Will there be another super superman to follow and another super-superman after that? In the end, man will become the equal of the creator of the universe, whoever or whatever He may be? Or will a period of decline after eating, with long return down the line, down through the superman to man again, and then on to the anthropoid ape, to the lower mammals, to the asexual cell, and, finally, to mere inert matter, gas, ether, and empty space?"

"In the United States, doing good has come to be, like patriotism, a favorite device of persons with something to sell."

"In this world of sin and sorrow there is always something to be thankful for; as for me, I rejoice that I am not a Republican."

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

"Is it hot in the rolling mill? Are the hours long? Is $15 a day not enough? Then escape is very easy. Simply throw up your job, spit on your hands, and write another "Rosenkavalier"."

"It costs more to maintain ten vices than one virtue."

"It is even harder for the average ape to believe that he has descended from man."

"It is hard for the ape to believe he descended from man."

"It is Hell, of course, that makes priests powerful, not Heaven, for after thousands of years of so-called civilization fear remains the one common denominator of mankind."

"It is impossible to imagine Goethe or Beethoven being good at billiards or golf."

"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. If such a board actually exists it operates precisely like the board of a corporation that is losing money."

"It is inaccurate to say I hate everything. I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty, and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible for any public office."

"It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics or chemistry."

"It is often argued that religion is valuable because it makes men good, but even if this were true it would not be a proof that religion is true. That would be an extension of pragmatism beyond endurance. Santa Claus makes children good in precisely the same way, and yet no one would argue seriously that the fact proves his existence. The defense of religion is full of such logical imbecilities."

"It is only in countries where there is no wine, e.g., England, that the answer to Genesis iv, 9 is yes."

"It is the fundamental theory of all the more recent American law... that the average citizen is half-witted, and hence not to be trusted to either his own devices or his own thoughts."

"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 interposed between themselves and the great flow of cosmic events, and they look to it to think for them and to protect them. In democratic countries it is theoretically their agent, but there seems to be a strong tendency to convert the presumably free citizen into its agent, or at all events, its client. This exalted view of its scope, character, powers and autonomy is fundamentally false. A government at bottom is nothing more than a group of men, and as a practical matter most of them are inferior men?. Yet these nonentities, by the intellectual laziness of men in general, have come to a degree of puissance in the world that is unchallenged by that of any other group. Their fiats, however preposterous, are generally obeyed as a matter of duty, they are assumed to have a kind of wisdom that is superior to ordinary wisdom, and the lives of multitudes are willingly sacrificed in their interest."

"It takes a long while for a naturally trustful person to reconcile himself to the idea that after all God will not help him."

"It takes no more actual sagacity to carry on the everyday hawking and haggling of the world, or to ladle out its normal doses of bad medicine and worse law, than it takes to operate a taxi cab or fry a pan of fish."

"It takes only one Communist to ruin a labor union. It takes only one drop of Oleum tiglii to turn a respectable class of rye into a Mickey Finn."

"It was morality that burned the books of the ancient sages, and morality that halted the free inquiry of the Golden Age and substituted for it the credulous imbecility of the Age of Faith. It was a fixed moral code and a fixed theology which robbed the human race of a thousand years by wasting them upon alchemy, heretic-burning, witchcraft and sacerdotalism."

"Jealousy is the theory that some other fellow has just as little taste."

"Judge: a law student who marks his own examination-papers."

"Jury: A group of twelve man who, having lied to the judge about their hearing, health, and business engagements, have failed to fool him."

"Laws are no longer made by a rational process of public discussion; they are made by a process of blackmail and intimidation, and they are executed in the same manner."

"Lawyer: one who protects us against robbery by taking away the temptation."

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

"Let's not burn the universities yet. After all, the damage they do might be worse."

"Liar: (a) One who pretends to be very good; (b) One who pretends to be very bad."

"Liberals have many tails and chase them all."

"Life is a constant oscillation between the sharp horns of a dilemma."

"Life is a dead-end street."

"Life may not be exactly pleasant, but it is at least not dull. Heave yourself into Hell today, and you may miss, tomorrow or next day, another Scopes trial, or another War to End War, or perchance a rich and buxom widow with all her first husband's clothes. There are always more Hardings hatching. I advocate hanging on as long as possible."

"Life without sex might be safer but it would be unbearably dull."

"Living with a dog is messy ? like living with an idealist."

"Love begins like a triolet and ends like a college yell."

"Love is an emotion that is based on an opinion of women that is impossible for those who have had any experience with them."

"Love is like a war. Easy to start, hard to end, and impossible to forget."

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

"Love is the delusion that one woman differs from another."

"Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence."

"Man is a beautiful machine that works very badly."

"Man is a natural polygamist: he always has one woman leading him by the nose, and another hanging on to his coattails."

"Man is always looking for someone to boast to; woman is always looking for a shoulder to put her head on."

"Man is never honestly the fatalist, nor even the stoic. He fights his fate, often desperately. He is forever entering bold exceptions to the rulings of the bench of gods. This fighting, no doubt, makes for human progress, for it favors the strong and the brave. It also makes for beauty, for lesser men try to escape from a hopeless and intolerable world by creating a more lovely one of their own."

"Man weeps to think that he will die so soon; woman, that she was born so long ago."

"Man's objection to love is that it dies hard: women's, that when it is dead it stays dead."