No form of liberty is worth a darn [sic] which doesn't give us the right to do wrong now and then.

All that the Y.M.C.A.'s horse and rings really accomplished was to fill me with an ineradicable distaste, not only for Christian endeavor in all its forms, but also for every variety of calisthenics, so that I still begrudge the trifling exertion needed to climb in and out of a bathtub, and hate all sports as rabidly as a person who likes sports hates common sense. If I had my way no man guilty of golf would be eligible to any office of trust or profit under the United States, and all female athletes would be shipped to the white-slave corrals of the Argentine.

America's biggest failure is its inability to take comedy seriously.

Why do men delight in work? Fundamentally, I suppose, because there is a sense of relief and pleasure in getting something done - a kind of satisfaction not unlike that which a hen enjoys on laying an egg.

No sane man objects to palpable lies about him; what he objects to is damaging facts.

The great artists of the world are never Puritans, and seldom even ordinarily respectable.

Man is the yokel par excellence, the booby unmatchable, the king dupe of the cosmos. He is chronically and unescapably deceived, not only by the other animals and by the delusive face of nature herself--by his incomparable talent for searching out and embracing what is false, and for overlooking and denying what is true.