C

• The religion of Hell is patriotism, and the government is an enlightened democracy.
• The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; and the pessimist fears this is true.

• Some people reach the top of the ladder only to find it is leaning against the wrong wall.

• An honest politician is one who, when he is bought, will stay bought.

• If there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life and eluding the implacable grandeur of this life.
• Those who write clearly have readers; those who write obscurely have commentators.

• Love when felt at all deeply has an element of transcendentalism in it, which makes it the most natural thing in the world for the two lovers--even though drawn together by a passing sex-attraction--to swear eternal troth to each other; but there is something quite diabolic and mephistophelean in the practice of the Law, which creeping up behind, as it were, at the critical moment, and overhearing the two pledging themselves, claps his book together with a triumphant bang and exclaims: "There now you are married and done for, for the rest of your natural lives."

• Never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what it would have appeared to them to be otherwise.

• Foreign aid might be defined as a transfer from poor people in rich countries to rich people in poor countries.

• Progress is nothing but the victory of laughter over dogma.

• He preaches well who lives well.

• Conscience is a cur that does not stop us from passing but that we cannot prevent from barking.

• Every man is a volume, if you know how to read him.
• Talent is worshipped; but if divorced from rectitude, it will prove more of a demon than a god.

• In San Francisco and Los Angeles I encountered a number of sun-baked zealots who insisted upon ingestion of tasteless grains, gloomy greens and an astonishing variety of obscure vegetables. All of the above were viable only if diligently nurtured in excrement-flavored soil. They also enthusiastically imbibed "cocktails," the ingredients of which included the mixed juices of turnips, cucumbers and carrots. These excruciating concoctions were all self-righteously set forth on the puritanical premise that the denial of sweetness, spice and succulence leads--at the very least--to eternal life.

• Fashion is the science of appearances, and it inspires one with the desire to seem rather than to be.

• Modesty is the only sure bait when you angle for praise.

• Democracy means government by the uneducated, while aristocracy means government by the badly educated.
• I am not absentminded. It is the presence of mind that makes me unaware of everything else.
• Merely having an open mind is nothing; the object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.
• "My country right or wrong," is a thing that no patriot would think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying, "My mother, drunk or sober."
• Free verse is like free love; it is a contradiction in terms.
• People generally quarrel because they cannot argue.

• Better do a kindness near home than go far away to burn incense.

• What can one say about a country where a museum of science in a great city can feature an exhibit in which people fire machine guns from a helicopter at Vietnamese huts, with a light flashing when a hit is scored? What can one say about a country where such an idea can even be considered? You have to weep for this country.
• Free institutions certainly exist (in America), but a tradition of passivity and conformism restricts their use--the cynic might say this is why they continue to exist.

• It is a socialist idea that making profits is a vice; I consider the real vice is making losses.
• The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of the blessings. The inherent blessing of socialism is the equal sharing of misery.
• Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.
• The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.

• There is no opinion so absurd that some philosopher will not express it.

• I would rather be right than President.
• An oppressed people are authorized whenever they can to rise and break their fetters.

• The police are the armed guardians of the social order. The blacks are the chief domestic victims of the American social order. A conflict of interest exists, therefore, between the blacks and the police. It is not solely a matter of trigger-happy cops, of brutal cops who love to crack black heads. Mostly it's a job to them. It pays good. And there are numerous fringe benefits. The real problem is a trigger-happy social order.

• Military justice is to justice what military music is to music.

• at a meeting with TV execs: "I'm someone who has a deep emotional attachment to Starsky and Hutch.

• "If you find a turtle on a lamppost, it didn't get there by accident." (Her billing records showed up on a table in the White House library two years after they were subpoenaed, but this is not what she had in mind.)

• Many a bum show has been saved by the flag.

• A "new thinker," when studied closely, is merely a man who does not know what other people have thought."

• Ambition makes the same mistake concerning power, that avarice makes as to wealth. She begins by accumulating it as a means of happiness, and finishes by continuing to accumulate it as an end.
• He that dies a martyr proves that he was not a knave, but by no means that he was not a fool.
• Power, like the diamonds, dazzles the beholder, and also the wearer; it dignifies meanness; it magnifies littleness; to what is contemptible, it gives authority; to what is low, exaltation.

• We may eventually come to realize that chastity is no more a virtue than malnutrition.

• We should not forget that our tradition is one of protest and revolt, and it is stultifying to celebrate the rebels of the past ... while we silence the rebels of the present.

• Act with kindness, but do not expect gratitude.
• In a country well governed poverty is something to be ashamed of. In a country badly governed wealth is something to be ashamed of.

• When Dr. Johnson defined patriotism as the last refuge of a scoundrel, he ignored the enormous possibilities of the word reform.

• Life is a maze in which we take the wrong turning before we have learnt to walk.
• Youth is a period of missed opportunities.

• Don't expect to build up the weak by pulling down the strong.
• Don't hesitate to be as revolutionary as science. Don't hesitate to be as reactionary as the multiplication table.
• I think the American public wants a solemn ass as President. And I think I'll go along with them.
• If you don't say anything, you won't be called on to repeat it.
• When more and more people are thrown out of work, unemployment results.

• Equality of condition is incompatible with civilization, and is found only to exist in those communities that are but slightly removed from the savage state. In practice, it can only mean a common misery.

• If the people be governors, who shall be governed?

• Frasier Crane responding to Daphne's assertion that men too use sex to get what they want: "How can we possibly use sex to get what we want? Sex is what we want!"

• The innocent class are always the victim of the few; they are in all countries and at all times the inferior agents, and must toil, and bleed and are always sure of meeting with oppression and rebuke. It is for the sake of the great leaders on both sides that so much blood must be spilt; that of the people is counted as nothing.

• The young always have the same problem--how to rebel and conform at the same time. They have solved this by defying their parents and copying one another.

• Our mind is conscious to itself of all its own actions, and both can, and often does, observe what counsels produced them; it naturally sits a judge upon its own actions, and thence procures to it self either tranquillity and joy, or anxiety and sorrow. In this power of the mind, and the actions thence arising, consists the whole force of conscience, by which it proposes laws to it self, examines its past, and regulates its future conduct.

• If an animal does something they call it instinct. If we do exactly the same thing for the same reason they call it intelligence.
• Etiquette means behaving yourself a little better than is absolutely necessary.
• Sartor Resartus is simply unreadable, and for me that always sort of spoils a book.

• There are only two ways to be unprejudiced and impartial. One is to be completely ignorant. The other is to be completely indifferent. Bias and prejudice are attitudes to be kept in hand, not attitudes to be avoided.

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