Congress-these, for the most part, illiterate hacks whose fancy vests are spotted with gravy, and whose speeches, hypocritical, unctuous, and slovenly, are spotted also with the gravy of political patronage.
Driving a car, you are in danger of killing; walking or standing, of being killed.
Being abroad makes you conscious of the whole imitative side of human behavior. The ape in man.
What I really do is take real plums and put them in an imaginary cake.
Illiteracy at the poverty level (mainly a matter of bad grammar) does not alarm me nearly as much as the illiteracy of the well-to-do.
It is impossible, except for theologians, to conceive of a world-wide scandal or a universe-wide scandal; the proof of this is the way people have settled down to living with nuclear fission, radiation poisoning, hydrogen bombs, satellites, and space rockets.
Laughter is the great antidote for self-pity, maybe a specific for the malady, yet probably it does tend to dry one's feelings out a little, as if by exposing them to a vigorous wind.
Understanding is often a prelude to forgiveness, but they are not the same, and we often forgive what we cannot understand (seeing nothing else to do) and understand what we cannot pardon.
I was going to get myself recognized at any price. If I could not win fame by goodness, I was ready to do it by badness.
Be truthful... and pay attention. I would also recommend the avoidance of credit cards.
In politics, it seems, retreat is honorable if dictated by military considerations and shameful if even suggested for ethical reasons.
The present can try to bury the past, an operation that is most atrocious when it is most successful.
What's the use of falling in love if you both remain inertly as you were?
Making love, we are all more alike than we are when we are talking or acting.
it's easier to forgive your enemies than to forgive your friends.
An unrectified case of injustice has a terrible way of lingering, restlessly, in the social atmosphere like an unfinished question.
When you have committed an action that you cannot bear to think about, that causes you to writhe in retrospect, do not seek to evade the memory: make yourself relive it, confront it repeatedly over and over, till finally, you will discover, through sheer repetition it loses its power to pain you. It works, I guarantee you, this sure-fire guilt-eradicator, like a homeopathic medicine - like in small doses applied to like. It works, but I am not sure that it is a good thing.
For self-realization, a rebel demands a strong authority, a worthy opponent, God to his Lucifer.
Life is a system of recurrent pairs, the poison and the antidote being eternally packaged together by some considerate heavenly druggist.
Others are to us like the characters in fiction, eternal and incorrigible; the surprises they give us turn out in the end to have been predictable and unexpected variations on the theme of being themselves.
People with bad consciences always fear the judgment of children.
Anti-Semitism is a horrible disease from which nobody is immune, and it has a kind of evil fascination that makes an enlightened person draw near the source of infection, supposedly in a scientific spirit, but really to sniff the vapors and dally with the possibility.
... the average Catholic perceives no connection between religion and morality, unless it is a question of someone else's morality.
Combativeness was, I suppose, the dominant trait in my grandmother's nature. An aggressive churchgoer, she was quite without Christian feeling; the mercy of the Lord Jesus had never entered her heart. Her piety was an act of war against Protestant ascendancy. ...The teachings of the Church did not interest her, except as they were a rebuke to others.
The desire to believe the best of people is a prerequisite for intercourse with strangers; suspicion is reserved for friends.
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