Imagine the Creator as a low comedian, and at once the world becomes explicable.

Never let your inferiors do you a favor - it will be extremely costly.

And what is a good citizen? Simply one who never says, does or thinks anything that is unusual. Schools are maintained in order to bring this uniformity up to the highest possible point. A school is a hopper into which children are heaved while they are still young and tender; therein they are pressed into certain standard shapes and covered from head to heels with official rubber-stamps.

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

Nothing can come out of an artist that is not in the man.

The cure for the evils of democracy is more democracy.

I can't imagine a genuinely intelligent boy getting much out of college, even out of a good college, save it be a cynical habit of mind.