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.

Justice is what you get when you run out of money.

All talk of winning the people by appealing to their intelligence, of conquering them by impeccable syllogism, is so much moonshine.

What the meaning of human life may be I don't know: I incline to suspect that it has none.

I devoured hot-dogs in Baltimore 'way back in 1886, and they were then very far from newfangled...They contained precisely the same rubber, indigestible pseudo-sausages that millions of Americans now eat, and they leaked the same flabby, puerile mustard. Their single point of difference lay in the fact that their covers were honest German Wecke made of wheat-flour baked to crispiness, and not the soggy rolls prevailing today, of ground acorns, plaster-of-Paris, flecks of bath-sponge, and atmospheric air all compact.

No married woman ever trusts her husband absolutely, nor does she ever act as if she did trust him. Her utmost confidence is as wary as an American pickpocket's confidence that the policeman on the beat will stay bought.

The capacity of human beings to bore one another seems to be vastly greater than that of any other animal. Some of their most esteemed inventions have no other apparent purpose - for example, the dinner party of more than two, the epic poem, and the science of metaphysics.