There are two impossibilities in life: "just one drink" and "an honest politician."

The townspeople are morons, yokels, peasants and genus homo boobiensis...surrounded by gaping primates from the upland vallies.

The saddest life is that of a political aspirant under democracy. His failure is ignominious and his success is disgraceful.

The essence of science is that it is always willing to abandon a given idea for a better one; the essence of theology is that it holds its truths to be eternal and immutable.

Women hate revolutions and revolutionists. They like men who are docile, and well-regarded at the bank, and never late at meals.

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.

The law is a sort of hocus-pocus science that smiles in your face while it picks your pocket.