The deepest sin against the human mind is to believe things without evidence.

The trouble with fiction," said John Rivers, "is that it makes too much sense. Reality never makes sense.

To his dog, every man is Napoleon; hence the constant popularity of dogs.

Every civilization is, among other things, an arrangement for domesticating the passions and setting them to do useful work.

The vast majority of human beings dislike and even actually dread all notions with which they are not familiar... Hence it comes about that at their first appearance innovators have generally been persecuted, and always derided as fools and madmen.

The soul of wit may become the very body of untruth. However elegant and memorable, brevity can never, in the nature of things, do justice to all the facts of a complex situations. On such a theme one can be brief only by omission and simplification. Omission and simplification help us to understand - but help is, in many cases, to understand the wrong thing; for our comprehension may be only of the abbreviator's neatly formulated notions, not of the vast, ramifying reality from which these notions have been so arbitrarily abstracted.

The pleasures of ignorance are as great, in their way, as the pleasures of knowledge.