A professional politician is a professionally dishonorable man. In order to get anywhere near high office he has to make so many compromises and submit to so many humiliations that he becomes indistinguishable from a streetwalker.

No one hates his job so heartily as a farmer.

No man of honor ever quite lives up to his code, any more than a moral man manages to avoid sin.

Men are the only animals that devote themselves, day in and day out, to making one another unhappy. It is an art like any other. Its virtuosi are called altruists.

What reason is there for believing that a high death rate, in itself, is undesirable? To my knowledge none whatever. The plain fact is that, if it be suitably selective, it is extremely salubrious. Suppose it could be so arranged that it ran to 100% a year among politicians, executive secretaries, drive chairmen, and the homicidally insane? What rational man would object?

If x is the population of the United States and y is the degree of imbecility of the average American, then democracy is the theory that x times y is less than y

Penetrating so many secrets, we cease to believe in the unknowable. But there it sits nevertheless, calmly licking its chops