Realism has always been called cynicism.

There is no human problem which could not be solved if people would simply do as I advise.

The United States was founded by the brightest people in the country — and we haven't seen them since.

I do not admire 'the people,' as such. No one really does. Their folk wisdom is usually false, their instincts predatory. Even their sense of survival - so highly developed in the individual - goes berserk in the mass. A crowd is a fool.

People have forgotten the effects of prohibition. We have become the United Statesof Amnesia.

Our only political party has two right wings, one called Republican, the other Democratic. But Henry Adams figured all that out back in the 1890s. "We have a single system," he wrote, and "in that system the only question is the price at which the proletariat is to be bought and sold, the bread and circuses."

History is idle gossip about a happening whose truth is lost the instant it has taken place.