Of all the human qualities, the one I admire the most is competence. A tailor who is really able to cut and fit a coat seems to me an admirable man, and by the same token a university professor who knows little or nothing of the thing he presumes to teach seems to me to be a fraud and a rascal.
Human progress is furthered, not by conformity, but by aberration.
It is impossible to imagine Goethe or Beethoven being good at billiards or golf.
Looking for an honest politician is like looking for an ethical burglar.
College football is a game which would be much more interesting if the faculty played instead of the students, and even more interesting if the trustees played. There would be a great increase in broken arms, legs, and necks, and simultaneously an appreciable diminution in the loss to humanity.
A politician is an animal which can sit on a fence and yet keep both ears to the ground.
Let no one mistake it for comedy, farcical though it may be in all its details. It serves notice on the country that Neanderthal man is organizing in these forlorn backwaters of the land, led by a fanatic, rid of sense and devoid of conscience.
The only guarantee of the Bill of Rights which continues to have any force and effect is the one prohibiting quartering troops on citizens in time of peace. All the rest have been disposed of by judicial interpretation and legislative whittling.
If we assume that man actually does resemble God, then we are forced into the impossible theory that God is a coward, an idiot and a bounder.
The so-called Philosophy of India is even more blowsy and senseless than the metaphysics of the West. It is at war with everything we know of the workings of the human mind, and with every sound idea formulated by mankind. If it prevailed in the whole modern world we'd still be in the Thirteenth Century; nay, we'd be back among the Egyptians of the pyramid age. Its only coherent contribution to Western thought has been theosophy-and theosophy is as idiotic as Christian Science. It has absolutely nothing to offer a civilized white man.
It is the dull man who is always sure, and the sure man who is always dull.
Religion deserves no more respect than a pile of garbage.
A man full of faith is simply one who has lost the capacity for clear and realistic thought.
There are two kinds of Europeans: The smart ones, and those who stayed behind.
Say what you will about the ten commandments, you must always come back to the pleasant fact that there are only ten of them.
Criticism is prejudice made plausible.
The cosmos is a gigantic flywheel making 10,000 revolutions per minute. Man is a sick fly taking a dizzy ride on it.
Remorse - Regret that one waited so long to do it.
It is not materialism that is the chief curse of the world, as pastors teach, but idealism. Men get into trouble by taking their visions and hallucinations too seriously.
Deep within the heart of every evangelist lies the wreck of a car salesman.
Man is a beautiful machine that works very badly.
The public, with its mob yearning to be instructed, edified and pulled by the nose, demands certainties; it must be told definitely and a bit raucously that this is true and that is false. But there are no certainties.
In the United States, doing good has come to be, like patriotism, a favorite device of persons with something to sell.
The argument that capital punishment degrades the state is moonshine, for if that were true then it would degrade the state to send men to war... The state, in truth, is degraded in its very nature: a few butcheries cannot do it any further damage.
The best teacher of children, in brief, is one who is essentially childlike.
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