Great Throughts Treasury

"The best teacher is not the one who knows most but the one who is most capable of reducing knowledge to that simple compound of the obvious and wonderful."

"The best years are the forties; after fifty a man begins to deteriorate, but in the forties he is at the maximum of his villainy."

"The capacity of human beings to bore one another seems to be vastly greater than that of any other animal."

"The central belief of every moron is that he is the victim of a mysterious conspiracy against his common rights and true deserts."

"The chief contribution of Protestantism to human thought is its massive proof that God is a bore."

"The Christian always swears a bloody oath that he will never do it again. The civilized man simply resolves to be a bit more careful next time."

"The Christian church, in its attitude toward science, shows the mind of a more or less enlightened man of the Thirteenth Century. It no longer believes that the earth is flat, but it is still convinced that prayer can cure after medicine fails."

"The common argument that crime is caused by poverty is a kind of slander on the poor."

"The cosmos is a gigantic flywheel making 10,000 revolutions per minute. Man is a sick fly taking a dizzy ride on it."

"The curse of man, and cause of nearly all of his woes, is his stupendous capacity for believing the incredible."

"The cynics are right nine times out of ten."

"The delusion of immortality is what ruined Egypt."

"The demagogue is one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots."

"The double standard of morality will survive in this world so long as the woman whose husband has been lured away is favoured with the sympathetic tears of other women, and a man whose wife has made off is laughed at by other men."

"The effort to reconcile science and religion is almost always made, not by theologians, but by scientists unable to shake off altogether the piety absorbed with their mother's milk."

"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. To be sure, theology is always yielding a little to the progress of knowledge, and only a Holy Roller in the mountains of Tennessee would dare to preach today what the popes preached in the thirteenth century."

"The essential dilemma of education is to be found in the fact that the sort of man (or woman) who knows a given subject sufficiently well to teach it is usually unwilling to do so."

"The extortions and oppressions of government will go on so long as such bare fraudulence deceives and disarms the victims - so long as they are ready to swallow the immemorial official theory that protesting against the stealings of the archbishop's secretary's nephew's mistress' illegitimate son is a sin against the Holy Ghost."

"The fact is that the average man's love of liberty is nine-tenths imaginary, exactly like his love of sense, justice and truth. He is not actually happy when free; he is uncomfortable, a bit alarmed, and intolerably lonely. Liberty is not a thing for the great masses of men. It is the exclusive possession of a small and disreputable minority, like knowledge, courage and honor. It takes a special sort of man to understand and enjoy liberty - and he is usually an outlaw in democratic societies."

"The fact that I have no remedy for all the sorrows of the world is no reason for my accepting yours. It simply supports the strong probability that yours is a fake."

"The first kiss is stolen by the man; the last is begged by the woman."

"The first Rotarian was the first man to call John the Baptist Jack."

"The fundamentalist mind, running in a single rut for fifty years, is now quite unable to comprehend dissent from its basic superstitions, or to grant any common honesty, or even any decency, to those who reject them."

"The government consists of a gang of men exactly like you and me. They have, taking one with another, no special talent for the business of government; they have only a talent for getting and holding office."

"The great artists of the world are never Puritans, and seldom even ordinarily respectable. No virtuous man - that is, virtuous in the Y.M.C.A. sense - has ever painted a picture worth looking at, or written a symphony worth hearing, or a book worth reading."

"The great secret of happiness in love is to be glad that the other fellow married her."

"The highfalutin aims of democracy, whether real or imaginary, are always assumed to be identical with its achievements. This, of course, is sheer hallucination. Not one of those aims, not even the aim of giving every adult a vote, has been realized. It has no more made men wise and free than Christianity has made them good."

"The honeymoon is the time during which the bride believes the bridegroom's word of honor."

"The human race is in such a dreadful state that no rational person can talk about it without resorting to seditious and obscene language."

"The ideal way to get rid of any infectious disease would be to shoot instantly every person who comes down with it."

"The inferior man's reasons for hating knowledge are not hard to discern. He hates it because it is complex - because it puts an unbearable burden upon his meager capacity for taking in ideas. Thus his search is always for short cuts. Their aim is to make the unintelligible simple, and even obvious."

"The intellectual heritage of the race belongs to the minority and to the minority only. The majority has no more to do with it than it has to do with ecclesiastic politics on Mars."

"The kind of man who demands that government enforce his ideas is always the kind whose ideas are idiotic."

"The liberation of the human mind has never been furthered by such learned dunderheads; it has been furthered by gay fellows who heaved dead cats into sanctuaries and then went roistering down the highways of the world, proving to all men that doubt, after all, was safe - that the god in the sanctuary was finite in his power, and hence a fraud. One horse-laugh is worth ten thousand syllogisms. It is not only more effective; it is also vastly more intelligent."

"The life of man in this world is like a likable fly in a room filled with 100 boys, each armed with a flyswatter."

"The lunatic fringe wags the underdog."

"The majority of men prefer delusion to truth. It soothes. It is easy to grasp. Above all, it fits more snugly than the truth into a universe of false appearances?of complex and irrational phenomena, defectively grasped. But though an idea that is true is thus not likely to prevail, an idea that is attacked enjoys a great advantage. The evidence behind it is now supported by sympathy, the sporting instinct, sentimentality?and sentimentality is as powerful as an army with banners. One never hears of a martyr in history whose notions are seriously disputed today. The forgotten ideas are those of the men who put them forward soberly and quietly, hoping fatuously that they would conquer by the force of their truth; these are the ideas that we now struggle to rediscover."

"The man is a natural polygamist. He always has one woman leading him by the nose and another hanging onto his coat-tails."

"The man who boasts of only telling the truth is just a man with no respect for her. Truth is not something that rolls around like loose change, is something to be cherished, accumulated and disbursed only when absolutely necessary. The smallest atom of truth represents the bitter toil and agony of a man, to every cell of it, there is the tomb of an angry owner of the truth about some ashes and a lonely soul frying in hell."

"The man who marries for love alone is at least honest. But so was Czolgosz."

"The meaning of religious freedom, I fear, is sometimes greatly misapprehended. It is taken to be a sort of immunity, not merely from governmental control but also from public opinion. A dunderhead gets himself a long-tailed coat, rises behind the sacred desk and emits such bilge as would gag a Hottentot. Is it to pass unchallenged? If so, then what we have is not religious freedom at all, but the most intolerable and outrageous variety of religious despotism. Any fool, once he is admitted to holy orders, becomes infallible. Any half-wit, by the simple device of ascribing his delusions to revelation, takes on an authority that is denied to all the rest of us."

"The men the American people admire most extravagantly are the most daring liars; the men they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth."

"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."

"The most common of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind."

"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."

"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 duties of citizenship in an enlightened and independent manner. Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States, whatever the pretensions of politicians, pedagogues and other such mountebanks, and that is its aim everywhere else."

"The New Deal began, like the Salvation Army, by promising to save humanity. It ended, again like the Salvation Army, by running flop-houses and disturbing the peace."

"The New Logic ? it would be nice if it worked. Ergo, it will work."

"The notion that a radical is one who hates his country is na‹ve and usually idiotic. He is, more likely, one who likes his country more than the rest of us, and is thus more disturbed than the rest of us when he sees it debauched. He is not a bad citizen turning to crime; he is a good citizen driven to despair."

"The objection to Puritans is not that they try to make us think as they do, but that they try to make us do as they think."