Great Throughts Treasury

"People will believe what they want to believe."

"Perhaps the most revolting character that the United States ever produced was the Christian Businessman."

"Philosophy consists very largely of one philosopher arguing that all others are jackasses. He usually proves it, and I should add that he also usually proves that he is one himself."

"Philosophy, as the modern world knows it, is only intellectual club-swinging."

"Platitude: an idea (a) that is admitted to be true by everyone, and (b) that is not true."

"Poetry has done enough when it charms, but prose must also convince."

"Politician: Any man with influence enough to get his old mother a job as charwoman in the City Hall."

"Politicians seldom if ever get [into public office] by merit alone, at least in democratic states. Sometimes, to be sure, it happens, but only by a kind of miracle. They are chosen normally for quite different reasons, the chief of which is simply their power to impress and enchant the intellectually underprivileged? Will any of them venture to tell the plain truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth about the situation of the country, foreign or domestic? Will any of them refrain from promises that he knows he can?t fulfill ? that no human being could fulfill? Will any of them utter a word, however obvious, that will alarm or alienate any of the huge pack of morons who cluster at the public trough, wallowing in the pap that grows thinner and thinner, hoping against hope?"

"Popularity: The capacity for listening sympathetically when men boast of their wives and women complain of their husbands."

"Poverty is a soft pedal upon the branches of human activity, not excepting the spiritual."

"Progress is the process whereby the human race is getting rid of whiskers, the vermiform appendix, and God."

"Psychotherapy: The theory that the patient will probably get well anyhow, and is certainly a damned ijjit."

"Public opinion, in its raw state, gushes out in the immemorial form of the mob's fear. It is piped into central factories, and there it is flavored and colored, and put into cans."

"Publish and be damned."

"Puritanism - the haunting fear that someone, somewhere may be happy."

"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 to improve the general situation of the American Negro is to convince more and more whites that he is, as men go in this world, a decent fellow, and that amicable living with him is not only possible but desirable. Every threat of mass political pressure, every appeal to political mountebanks, only alarms the white brother, and so postpones the day of reasonable justice."

"Religion deserves no more respect than a pile of garbage."

"Religion is a conceited effort to deny the most obvious realities."

"Religion is fundamentally opposed to everything I hold in veneration - courage, clear thinking, honesty, fairness, and, above all, love of the truth."

"Religion, like poetry, is simply a concerted effort to deny the most obvious realities."

"Remorse: Regret that one waited so long to do it."

"Say what you like about the Ten Commandments, you must always come back to the pleasant fact that there are only ten of them."

"School days, I believe, are the unhappiest in the whole span of human existence. They are full of dull, unintelligible tasks, new and unpleasant ordinances, brutal violations of common sense and common decency. It doesn't take a reasonably bright boy long to discover that most of what is rammed into him is nonsense, and that no one really cares very much whether he learns it or not."

"School teachers, taking them by and large, are probably the most ignorant and stupid class of men in the whole group of mental workers."

"Self-respect ? The secure feeling that no one, as yet, is suspicious."

"Show me a Puritan and I'll show you a son-of-a-bitch."

"So long as there are men in the world, 99 percent of them will be idiots, and so long as 99 percent of them are idiots they will thirst for religion, and so long as they thirst for religion, it will remain a weapon over them. I see no way out. If you blow up one specific faith, they will embrace another."

"Socialism, Puritanism, Philistinism, Christianity-he saw the all as allotropic forms of democracy, as variations upon the endless struggle of quantity against quality, of the weak and timorous against the strong and enterprising, of the botched against the fit."

"Strike an average between what a woman thinks of her husband a month before she marries him and what she thinks of him a year afterward, and you will have the truth about him."

"Suicide is a belated acquiescence in the opinion of one's wife's relatives."

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

"Sunday: A day given over by Americans to wishing that they themselves were dead and in Heaven, and that their neighbors were dead and in Hell."

"Suppose two-thirds of the members of the national House of Representatives were dumped into the Washington garbage incinerator tomorrow, what would we lose to offset our gain of their salaries and the salaries of their parasites?"

"Syllogisms … la Mode ? If you are against labor racketeers, then you are against the working man. If you are against demagogues, then you are against democracy. If you are against Christianity, then you are against God. If you are against trying a can of old Dr. Quack's Cancer Salve, then you are in favor of letting Uncle Julius die."

"Temptation is a woman's weapon and man's excuse."

"Temptation is an irresistible force at work on a movable body."

"Temptation is woman's weapon and man's excuse."

"Thanksgiving Day: A day devoted by persons with inflammatory rheumatism to thanking a loving Father that is not hydrophobia."

"That Americans, in the mass, have anything properly described as keen wits is surely far from self-evident. On the contrary, it seems likely that, if anything, they lie below the civilised norm."

"The aim of New Deals is to exterminate the class of creditors and thrust all men into that of debtorss It is like trying to breed cattle with all cows and no bulls."

"The allurement that women hold out to men is precisely the allurement that Cape Hatteras holds out to sailors: they are enormously dangerous and hence enormously fascinating."

"The Americans are the illegitimate children of the English."

"The argument that capital punishment degrades the state is moonshine, for if that were true then it would degrade the state to send men to war... The state, in truth, is degraded in its very nature: a few butcheries cannot do it any further damage."

"The Atheist Confesses: Let us thank God that there is no God."

"The average man never really thinks from end to end of his life. The mental activity of such people is only a mouthing of clich‚s. What they mistake for thought is simply a repetition of what they have heard. My guess is that well over 80 percent of the human race goes through life without having a single original thought."

"The average newspaper, especially of the better sort, has the intelligence of a hillbilly evangelist, the courage of a rat, the fairness of a prohibitionist boob-jumper, the information of a high school janitor, the taste of a designer of celluloid valentines, and the honor of a police-station lawyer."

"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. The objection to it is not that it is predominantly painful, but that it is lacking in sense."

"The believing mind is externally impervious to evidence. The most that can be accomplished with it is to induce it to substitute one delusion for another. It rejects all overt evidence as wicked."

"The believing mind reaches its perihelion in the so-called liberals. They believe in each and every quack who sets up his booth on the fair-grounds, including the Communists. The Communists have some talents too, but they always fall short of believing in the liberals."

"The best client is a scared millionaire."