The ideal way to get rid of any infectious disease would be to shoot instantly every person who comes down with it.

It is the theory of all modern civilized governments that they protect and foster the liberty of the citizen; it is the practice of all of them to limit its exercise, and sometimes very narrowly.

The effort to reconcile science and religion is almost always made, not by theologians, but by scientists unable to shake off altogether the piety absorbed with their mother's milk.

Every complex problem has a simple solution that doesn't work.

A government at bottom is nothing more than a group of men, and as a practical matter most of them are inferior men. ... Yet these nonentities, by the intellectual laziness of men in general ... are generally obeyed as a matter of duty (and) assumed to have a kind of wisdom that is superior to ordinary wisdom.

A critic is a man who writes about things he doesn't like.

Philadelphia is the most pecksniffian of American cities, and thus probably leads the world.