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The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is
able to think things out...without regard to the prevailing superstitions
and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government
he lives under is dishonest, insane, intolerable. I am not only wrong, it appears, I am also immoral - the familiar step in Puritan logic. |
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 kind of man who wants the government to adopt and enforce his ideas is always the kind of man whose ideas are idiotic. |
The capacity of human beings to bore one another seems to be vastly greater than that of any other animals. Some of their most esteemed inventions have no other apparent purpose, for example, the dinner party of more than two, the epic poem, and the science of metaphysics. | What is the function that a clergyman performs in the world? Answer: he gets his living by assuring idiots that he can save them from an imaginary hell. It is a business almost indistinguishable from that of a seller of snake-oil for rheumatism. |
The honorary degree is a way of honoring a pompous ass. No honest person would accept a degree he hadn't worked for. Honorary degrees are suitable only for realtors, chiropractors and presidents of the United States. | The theory behind representative government is that superior men--or at all events, men not inferior to the average in ability and integrity--are chosen to manage the public business, and that they carry on this work with reasonable intelligence and honesty. There is little support for that theory in the known facts... |
Metaphysics is almost always an attempt to prove the incredible by an appeal to the unintelligible. | An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup. |
Theology: An effort to explain the unknowable by putting it into terms
of the not worth knowing. |
The older I grow, the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom. |
A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin.
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The only good bureaucrat is one with a pistol at his head. Put it in his hand and it's good-by to the Bill of Rights. |
No one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public. | Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under. |
The capacity of human beings to bore one another seems to be vastly greater
than that of any other animal. |
The difference between a moral man and a man of honor is that the latter regrets a discreditable act, even when it has worked and he has not been caught. |
For every human problem, there is a neat, simple solution; and it is always
wrong |
A celebrity is one who is known by many people he is glad he doesn't know |
The great masses of men, though theoretically free, are seen to submit supinely to oppression and exploitation of a hundred abhorrent sorts. Have they no means of resistance? Obviously they have. The worst tyrant, even under democratic plutocracy, has but one throat to slit. The moment the majority decided to overthrow him he would be overthrown. But the majority lacks the resolution; it cannot imagine taking the risks. | It is the invariable habit of bureaucracies, at all times and everywhere, to assume...that every citizen is a criminal. Their one apparent purpose, pursued with a relentless and furious diligence, is to convert the assumption into a fact. They hunt endlessly for proofs, and, when proofs are lacking, for mere suspicions. The moment they become aware of a definite citizen, John Doe, seeking what is his right under the law, they begin searching feverishly for an excuse for withholding it from him. |
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. | We are here and it is now. Further than that all human knowledge is moonshine. |
Legend: a lie that has attained the dignity of age. | If you want peace, work for justice. |
For men become civilized, not in proportion to their willingness to believe, but in their readiness to doubt. | I don't think the boy of lively mind is hurt much by going to college. If he encounters mainly jackasses, then he learns the useful lesson that this is a jackass world. |
A great nation is any mob of people which produces at least one honest
man a century. |
Clergyman: A ticket speculator outside the gates of Heaven. |
Pastor: One employed by the wicked to prove to them by his example that virtue doesn't pay. | It is only the savage, whether of the African bush or of the American gospel tent, who pretends to know the will and intent of God exactly and completely. |
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 a standard citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. |
For it is the natural tendency of the ignorant to believe what is not true. In order to overcome that tendency it is not sufficient to exhibit the true; it is also necessary to expose and denounce the false. |
The fundamental purpose of education, in college as in the high-school and so on down to the kindergarten, is to set the young mind upon a track, and keep it running there in all decorum. The task of a pedagogue, in other words, is not to turn out anarchists, but to turn out correct and respectable citizens. | And out of each [schoolhouse] is vomited the standard product of the New Pedagogy - an endless procession of adolescents who have been taught everything save that which is true, and outfitted with every trick save those that are socially useful. |
The natural tendency of every government is to grow steadily worse - that
is, to grow more satisfactory to those who constitute it and less satisfactory
to those who support it. |
All mammals, in truth, seem to have an inborn tendency to identify causation with volition. They are naturally pugnacious, and life to them consists largely of a search for something or someone to blame it on. |
In old Abe, in fact, the cross-roads politician was always visible. He
never did anything without figuring out its consequences to five places
of decimals, and when those consequences promised to damage his private
fortunes he usually found a good reason to refrain. |
One of the things that makes a Negro unpleasant to white folk is the fact that he suffers from their injustice. He is thus a standing rebuke to them, and they try to put him out of their minds. The easiest way to do so is to insist that he keep his place. |
Many a boy of really fine mind is ruined in school. Along with a few sound values, many false ones are thrust into his thinking, and he inevitably acquires something of the attitude of mind of the petty bureaucrats told off to teach him. | 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. |
I believe there is a limit beyond which free speech cannot go, but it's a limit that's very seldom mentioned. It's the point where free speech begins to collide with the right to privacy. I don't think there are any other conditions to free speech. I've got a right to say and believe anything I please, but I haven't got a right to press it on anybody else. .... Nobody's got a right to be a nuisance to his neighbors. | The notion that a radical is one who hates his country is naive and usually idiotic. He is, more likely, one who loves 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. |
I am against slavery simply because I dislike slaves. |
[Harding:] ...he has the courage of his hypocrisies. |
There is something even more valuable to civilization than wisdom, and that is character. | When a woman says she won't, it is a good sign that she will. And when she says she will it is an even better sign. |
The Army regulations provide that every man must be treated "so as
to preserve his self-respect." This is the essence of conduct in civilized
society. |
Some boys go to college and eventually succeed in getting out. Others go to college and never succeed in getting out. The latter are called professors. |
I do not believe in education, and am glad I never went to a university. Beyond the rudiments, it is impossible to teach anything. All the rest the student acquires himself. His teacher merely makes it difficult for him. I never learned anything in school. | It seems to me that one of the prime jobs of every educated man on this earth is to denounce charlatans. New ones are always popping up, and the common run of idiots are always succumbing to them. There is little if any difference between one and another. |
I have long been convinced that the idea of liberty is abhorrent to most human beings. What they want is security, not freedom. Thus it seldom causes any public indignation when an enterprising tyrant claps down on one of his enemies. To most men it seems a natural proceeding. | Of all the human qualities, the one I admire the most is competence. A tailor who is really able to cut and fit a coat seems to me an admirable man, and by the same token a university professor who knows little or nothing of the thing he presumes to teach seems to me to be a fraud and a rascal. |