Of all the human qualities, the one I admire the most is competence. A tailor who is really able to cut and fit a coat seems to me an admirable man, and by the same token a university professor who knows little or nothing of the thing he presumes to teach seems to me to be a fraud and a rascal.

The Catholic clergy seldom bother to make their arguments plausible; it is plain that they have little respect for human intelligence, and indeed little belief in its existence.

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

What we need in this country is a general improvement in eating. We have the best raw materials in the world, both quantitatively and qualitatively, but most of them are ruined in the process of preparing them for the table.

Henry James would have been vastly improved as a novelist by a few whiffs of the Chicago stockyard.

The only liberty an inferior man really cherishes is the liberty to quit work, stretch out in the sun, and scratch himself.

The kind of man who demands that government enforce his ideas is always the kind whose ideas are idiotic.