There comes a time in every man's life when he's consumed by the desire to spit on his palms, hoist the black flag and start cutting throats.

The American people, taking one with another, constitute the most timorous, snivelling, poltroonish, ignominious mob of serfs and goosesteppers ever gathered under one flag in Christendom since the end of the Middle Ages.

Skin diseases are something doctors like, the patient neither dies nor gets well.

There is no record in human history of a happy philosopher: they exist only in romantic legend.

Watching two women kiss is like watching two prizefighters shake hands.

At a time when the respectable bourgeois youngsters of my generation were college freshmen, oppressed by simian sophomores and affronted with balderdash daily and hourly by chalky pedagogues, I was at large in a wicked seaport of half a million people, with a front seat at every public show, as free of the night as of day, and getting earfuls of instruction in a hundred giddy arcana, none of them taught in schools.... [But] if I neglected the humanities, I was meanwhile laying in all the worldly wisdom of a police lieutenant, a bartender, a shyster lawyer, or a midwife.

Hope: A pathological belief in the occurrence of the impossible.