A government at bottom is nothing more than a group of men, and as a practical matter most of them are inferior men. ... Yet these nonentities, by the intellectual laziness of men in general ... are generally obeyed as a matter of duty (and) assumed to have a kind of wisdom that is superior to ordinary wisdom.

The best teacher of children, in brief, is one who is essentially childlike.

The older I get the more I admire and crave competence, just simple competence, in any field from adultery to zoology.

There are no dull subjects. There are only dull writers.

I believe that religion, generally speaking, has been a curse to mankind.

Whenever A annoys or injures B on the pretense of saving or improving X, A is a scoundrel.

The theory behind representative government is that superior men-or at least men not inferior to the average in ability and integrity-are chosen to manage the public business, and that they carry on this work with reasonable intelligence and honest. There is little support for that theory in known facts.