A current pejorative adjective is narcissistic. Generally, a narcissist is anyone better looking than you are, but lately the adective is often applied to those "liberals" who prefer to improve the lives of others rather than exploit them. Apparently, a concern for others is self-love at its least attractive, while greed is now a sign of the hightest altruism. But then to reverse, periodically, the meanings of words is a very small price to pay for our vast freedom not only to conform but to consume.

True wisdom is to know the extent of what you don't know quite as well as you know what you do know.

As Brooks Adams put it, the sole problem of our ruling class is whether to coerce or to bribe the powerless majority.

I have always found men quite fathomable. They look entirely to their own interest.

Teaching has ruined more American novelists than drink.

Despite the warnings of other times, the impetuous and the confident continue their indiscriminate cultivation of weeds at the expense of occasional flowers.

The worst that can be said about pornography is that it leads not to anti-social acts but to the reading of more pornography