Sunday is a day given over by Americans to wishing that the themselves were dead and in Heaven, and that their neighbors were dead and in Hell.

The taboos that I have mentioned are extraordinarily harsh and numerous. They stand around nearly every subject that is genuinely important to man: they hedge in free opinion and experimentation on all sides. Consider, for example, the matter of religion. It is debated freely and furiously in almost every country in the world save the United States, but here the critic is silenced. The result is that all religions are equally safeguarded against criticism, and that all of them lose vitality. We protect the status quo, and so make steady war upon revision and improvement.

The natural tendency of every government is to grow steadily worse-that is, to grow more satisfactory to those who constitute it and less satisfactory to those who support it.

Man is a beautiful machine that works very badly. He is like a watch of which the most that can be said is that its cosmetic effect is good.

If what I may believe - about gall-stones, the Constitution, castor oil, or God - is conditioned by law, then I am not a free man.

Man weeps to think that he will die so soon; woman, that she was born so long ago.

A skeptic as to all ideas, including especially my own, I have never suffered a pang when the ideas of some other imbecile prevailed.