I am, in fact, the complete anti-Messiah, and detest converts almost as much as I detest missionaries. My writings, such as they are, have had only one purpose: to attain for H. L. Mencken that feeling of tension relieved and function achieved which a cow enjoys on giving milk.

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

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

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

[C]lass consciousness is not one of our national diseases; we suffer, indeed, from its opposite-the delusion that class barriers are not real. That delusion reveals itself in many forms, some of them as beautiful as a glass eye. One is the Liberal doctrine that a prairie demagogue promoted to the United States Senate will instantly show all the sagacity of a Metternich ... another is the doctrine that a moronrun through a university and decorated with a Ph.D. will cease thereby to be a moron.

The men the American people admire most extravagantly are the most daring liars; the men they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth.

Economic independence is the foundation of the only sort of freedom worth a damn