Every man is a moon and has a side which he turns toward nobody: you have to slip around behind it if you want to see it.

It is not like studying German, where you mull along, in a groping, uncertain way, for thirty years; and at last, just as you think you've got it, they spring the subjunctive on you, and there you are. No- and I see now plainly enough, that the great pity about the German language is, that you can't fall off it and hurt yourself. There is nothing like that feature to make you attend strictly to business.

Stripping away the irrational, the illogical, and the impossible, I am left with atheism. I can live with that.

Man is the only animal that is cruel. It kills just for the sake of it.

Priapism is what happens when someone gets strangulated to the point of hypoxia.

The Christian Bible is a drug store. It´s contents have remained the same but the medical practice continues. For 1,800 years these changes were slight--scarcely noticeable... The dull and ignorant physician day and night, and all the days and all the nights, drenched his patient with vast and hideous doses of the most repulsive drugs to be found in the store´s stock. He kept him religion sick for eighteen centuries, and allowed him not a well day during all that time.

We adore titles and heredities in our hearts and ridicule them with our mouths. This is our democratic privilege.