The brotherhood of men does not imply their equality. Families have their fools and their men of genius, their black sheep and their saints, their worldly successes and their worldly failures. A man should treat his brothers lovingly and with justice, according to the deserts of each. But the deserts of every brother are not the same.

People are much too solemn about things - I'm all for sticking pins into episcopal behinds.

Men have always been a prey to distractions, which arethe original sins of the mind; but never before today has an attempt been made to organize and exploit distractions, to make of them, because of their economic importance, the core and vital center of human life, to idealize them as the highest manifestations of mental activity. Ours is an age of systematized irrelevances, and the imbecile within us has become one of the Titans, upon whose shoulders rests the weight of the social and economic system

Universal happiness keeps the wheels steadily turning, truth and beauty can't.

All conditioning aims at that: making people like their inescapable social destiny.

All gods are homemade, and it is we who pull their strings, and so, give them the power to pull ours.

Generalized intelligence and mental alertness are the most powerful enemies of dictatorship and at the same time the basic conditions of effective democracy.