The criminal is the creative artist; the detective only the critic.

The State did not own men so entirely, even when it could send them to the stake, as it sometimes does now where it can send them to the elementary school.

It's not the world that's got so much worse but the news coverage that's got so much better.

But whenever one meets modern thinkers (as one often does) progressing toward a madhouse, one always finds, on inquiry, that they have just had a splendid escape from another madhouse. Thus, hundreds of people become Socialists, not because they have tried Socialism and found it nice, but because they have tried Individualism and found it particularly nasty.

Happiness is not only a hope, but also in some strange manner a memory ... we are all kings in exile.

The old restriction meant that only the orthodox were allowed to discuss religion. Modern liberty means that nobody is allowed to discuss it. Good taste, the last and vilest of human superstitions, has succeeded in silencing us where all the rest have failed.

I am more than a devil; I am a man. I can do the one thing which Satan himself cannot do— I can die.