When a candidate for public office faces the voters he does not face men of sense; he faces a mob of men whose chief distinguishing mark is the fact that they are quite incapable of weighing ideas, or even of comprehending any save the most elemental - men whose whole thinking is done in terms of emotion, and whose dominant emotion is dread of what they cannot understand. So confronted, the candidate must either bark with the pack or be lost... All the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre.

You never push a noun against a verb without trying to blow up something.

The best years are the forties; after fifty a man begins to deteriorate, but in the forties he is at the maximum of his villainy.

The objection to Puritans is not that they try to make us think as they do, but that they try to make us do as they think.

The average man does not get pleasure out of an idea because he thinks it is true; he thinks it is true because he gets pleasure out of it.

Whenever a reporter is assigned to cover a Methodist conference, he comes home an atheist.

A gentlemen is one who never strikes a woman without provocation.