Journalism is to politician as dog is to lamp-post.

The capacity of human beings to bore one another seems to be vastly greater than that of any other animal. Some of their most esteemed inventions have no other apparent purpose - for example, the dinner party of more than two, the epic poem, and the science of metaphysics.

If x is the population of the United States and y is the degree of imbecility of the average American, then democracy is the theory that x times y is less than y

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

[Thomas Henry] Huxley, I believe, was the greatest Englishman of the Nineteenth Century—perhaps the greatest Englishman of all time. When one thinks of him, one thinks inevitably of such men as Goethe and Aristotle. For in him there was that rich, incomparable blend of intelligence and character, of colossal knowledge and high adventurousness, of instinctive honesty and indomitable courage which appears in mankind only once in a blue moon. There have been far greater scientists, even in England, but there has never been a scientist who was a greater man.

Nothing can come out of an artist that is not in the man.

I'm ombibulous. I drink every known alcoholic drink and enjoy them all.