I like to pay taxes. With them, I buy civilization.

To be civilized is to be potentially master of all possible ideas, and that means that one has got beyond being shocked, although one preserves one's own moral aesthetic preferences.

War? War is an organized bore.

We are all sentenced to capital punishment for the crime of living, and though the condemned cell of our earthly existence is but a narrow and bare dwelling-place, we have adjusted ourselves to it, and made it tolerably comfortable for the little while we are to be confined in it.

Our morality seems to be only a check on the ultimate domination of force, just as our politeness is a check on the impulse of every pig to put his feet in the trough.

There is something frightful in the way in which not only characteristic qualities, but particular manifestations of them, are repeated from generation to generation.

Anytime you see a Hungarian, kick him. He'll know why. Any two philosophers can tell each other all they know in two hours.