The martini: the only American invention as perfect as the sonnet.

Popularity--The capacity for listening sympathetically when men boast of their wives and women complain of their husbands.

The aim of poetry, it appears, is to fill the mind with lofty thoughts--not to give it joy, but to give it a grand and somewhat gaudy sense of virtue. The essay is a weapon against the degenerate tendencies of the age. The novel, properly conceived, is a means of uplifting the spirit; its aim is to inspire, not merely to satisfy the low curiosity of man in man.

Government is actually the worst failure of civilized man. There has never been a really good one, and even those that are most tolerable are arbitrary, cruel, grasping and unintelligent.

The formula of the argument is simple and familiar: to dispose of a problem all that is necessary is to deny that it exists.

Capitalism under democracy has a further advantage: its enemies, even when it is attacked, are scattered and weak, and it is usually easily able to array one half of them against the other half, and thus dispose of both.

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.