The sorrows and disasters of Europe always brought fortune to America.

Advertising: the science of arresting the human intelligence long enough to get money from it.

I've seen lifelong friends drift apart over golf just because one could play better, but the other counted better.

I detest life-insurance agents: they always argue that I shall some day die, which is not so.

How can you shorten the subject? That stern struggle with the multiplication table, for many people not yet ended in victory, how can you make it less? Square root, as obdurate as a hardwood stump in a pasturenothing but years of effort can extract it. You can't hurry the process. Or pass from arithmetic to algebra; you can't shoulder your way past quadratic equations or ripple through the binomial theorem. Instead, the other way; your feet are impeded in the tangled growth, your pace slackens, you sink and fall somewhere near the binomial theorem with the calculus in sight on the horizon.

In ancient times they had no statistics so they had to fall back on lies.

Now, the essence, the very spirit of Christmas is that we first make believe a thing is so, and lo, it presently turns out to be so.