One smart reader is worth a thousand boneheads.

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

The allurement that women hold out to men is precisely the allurement that Cape Hatteras holds out to sailors; they are enormously dangerous and hence enormously fascinating.

Morality is doing what is right, no matter what you are told. Religion is doing what you are told, no matter what is right.

The fact is that liberty, in any true sense, is a concept that lies quite beyond the reach of the inferior man's mind. And no wonder, for genuine liberty demands of its votaries a quality he lacks completely, and that is courage. The man who loves it must be willing to fight for it; blood, said Jefferson, is its natural manure. Liberty means self-reliance, it means resolution, it means the capacity for doing without . . . the average man doesn't want to be free. He wants to be safe.

The most valuable of all human possessions, next to a superior and disdainful air, is the reputation of being well-to-do.

A Puritan is someone who is desperately afraid that, somewhere, someone might be having a good time.