The argument that capital punishment degrades the state is moonshine, for if that were true then it would degrade the state to send men to war... The state, in truth, is degraded in its very nature: a few butcheries cannot do it any further damage.

Law and its instrument, government, are necessary to the peace and safety of all of us, but all of us, unless we live the lives of mud turtles, frequently find them arrayed against us.

There is no idea so stupid that you can't find a professor who will believe it.

A man who is an agnostic by inheritance, so that he doesn't remember any time that he wasn't, has almost no hatred for the religious.

The Jews fastened their religion upon the Western world, not because it was more reasonable than the religions of their contemporaries - as a matter of fact, it was vastly less reasonable than many of them - but because it was far more poetical.

The central belief of every moron is that he is the victim of a mysterious conspiracy against his common rights and true deserts.

All government is, in its essence, organized exploitation, and in virtually all of its existing forms it is the implacable enemy of every industrious and well-disposed man.