In the United States, doing good has come to be, like patriotism, a favorite device of persons with something to sell.

The theatre, when all is said and done, is not life in miniature, but life enormously magnified, life hideously exaggerated.

You come into the world with nothing, and the purpose of your life is to make something out of nothing.

Firmness in decision is often merely a form of stupidity. It indicates an inability to think the same thing out twice.

The storm center of lawlessness in every American State is the State Capitol. It is there that the worst crimes are committed; it is there that lawbreaking attains to the estate and dignity of a learned profession; it is there that contempt for the laws is engendered, fostered, and spread broadcast.

What I got in Sunday school ... was simply a firm conviction that the Christian faith was full of palpable absurdities, and the Christian God preposterous.... The act of worship, as carried on by Christians, seems to me to be debasing rather than ennobling. It involves groveling before a being who, if he really exists, deserves to be denounced instead of respected.

The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed a standard citizenry, to put down dissent and originality.