America's biggest failure is its inability to take comedy seriously.

The instant I reach Heaven, I'm going to speak to God very sharply.

Complete masculinity and stupidity are often indistinguishable.

Our literature, despite several false starts that promised much, is chiefly remarkable, now as always, for its respectable mediocrity.

There's really no point to voting. If it made any difference, it would probably be illegal.

It is common to assume that human progress affects everyone - that even the dullest man, in these bright days, knows more than any man of, say, the Eighteenth Century, and is far more civilized. This assumption is quite erroneous. . . . The great masses of men, even in this inspired republic, are precisely where the mob was at the dawn of history. They are ignorant, they are dishonest, they are cowardly, they are ignoble. They know little if anything that is worth knowing, and there is not the slightest sign of a natural desire among them to increase their knowledge.

The average schoolmaster is and always must be essentially an ass, for how can one imagine an intelligent man engaging in so puerile an avocation.