H

• I've never met a healthy person who worried much about his health, or a good person who worried much about his soul.

• When the people contend for their liberty they seldom get anything by their victory but new masters.

• Today the sun, tonight the moon. When will it stop!
• What you are is the result of your genes and your history. But it is you who decides what you will do. The part of the environment that is morally responsible for your actions is what we mean by you.
• Not everybody can bat fourth.
• If men were meant to live outdoors, they wouldn't be born in hospitals.
• When a liberal sees a person in distress, his conscience urges him to pass a law to force me to help.
• The only man who never does anything wrong is the man who never does anything. So don't do anything.
• Nobody else can decide the great questions. I am the only one who can do it. And so are you.
• If you are a child, obey your parents. If you are an adult, make your own decisions.
• Do it yourself. Don't delegate your responsibility to the church or the state.
• Classical liberals believe the state is created to protect property rights. I believe the state is created to violate property rights.
• Taxation with or without representation is tyranny.
• A man who does not think for himself does not think at all.
• If you are old enough to vote, you shouldn't have to.

• Before borrowing from a friend, decide which you need more.

• The interest of the State is in intimate connection with those of the rich individuals belonging to it.

• Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it; no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it. While it lies there, it needs no constitution, no law, no court to save it.

• Ther's sommat in our blood that won't take kindly to the notion of being bound to do what we would do readily enough if not bound.

• Capital punishment is our society's recognition of the sanctity of human life.

• Let the buyer beware; that covers the whole business. You cannot wet-nurse people from the time they are born until the time they die. They have to wade in and get stuck, and that is the way men are educated.

• No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself, and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the true.

• The proposal is frequently made that the government ought to assume the risks that are "too great for private industry." This means that bureaucrats should be permitted to take risks with the tax payer's money that no one is willing to take with his own.
• When the government makes loans or subsidies to business, what it does is to tax successful private businesses in order to support unsuccessful private businesses.

• Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps; for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are and what they ought to be.
• Wit is the salt of conversation, not the food.

• We learn from history that we do not learn from history.

• Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded--here and there, now and then--are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.
  This is known as ‘bad luck.’
• Be wary of strong drink. It can make you shoot at the tax collector--and miss.
• All men are created unequal.
• Most gods have the manners and morals of a spoiled child.
• The most preposterous notion that H. sapiens has ever dreamed up is that the Lord God of Creation, Shaper and Ruler of the Universes, wants the saccharine adoration of His creatures, can be swayed by their prayers, and becomes petulant if He does not receive this flattery. Yet this absurd fantasy, without a shred of evidence to bolster it, pays all the expenses of the oldest, largest, and least productive industry in all history.
• If heredity were not overwhelmingly more important than environment, you could teach calculus to a horse.
• If the universe has any purpose more important than topping a woman you love and making a baby with her hearty help, I’ve never heard of it.
• the plural of ‘spouse’ is ‘spice.’
• Money is truthful. If a man speaks of his honor, make him pay cash.
• This sad little lizard told me that he was a brontosaurus on his mother’s side. I did not laugh; people who boast of ancestry often have little else to sustain them. Humoring them costs nothing and adds to happiness in a world in which happiness is always in short supply.
• A whore should be judged by the same criteria as other professionals offering services for pay--such as dentists, lawyers, hairdressers, physicians, plumbers, etc. Is she professionally competent? Does she give good measure? Is she honest with her clients?
  It is possible that the percentage of honest and competent whores is higher than that of plumbers and much higher than that of lawyers. And enormously higher than that of professors.
• Most ‘scientists’ are bottle washers and button sorters.
• Taxes are not levied for the benefit of the taxed.
• One man’s theology is another man’s belly laugh.
• "God split himself into a myriad parts that he might have friends." This may not be true, but it sounds good--and is no sillier than any other theology.
• Climate is what we expect, weather is what we get.

• The only good thing about it (aging) is you're not dead.

• Democracy used to be a good thing, but now it has gotten into the wrong hands.

• The free man is the man who is not in irons, not imprisoned in a gaol, not terrorized like a slave by the fear of punishment ... it is not a lack of freedom not to fly like an eagle or swim like a whale.

• The first panacea for a mismanaged nation is inflation of the currency; the second is war. Both bring a temporary prosperity; both bring a permanent ruin. Both are the refuge of political and economic opportunists.
• What is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.
• In modern war there is nothing sweet nor fitting in your dying. You will die like a dog for no good reason.

• If some people got their rights they would complain of being deprived of their wrongs.

• It is a good thing that life is not as serious as it seems to a waiter.
• Most wives are nicer than their husbands, but that's nothing; I am nice to everybody from whom I get money.
• Women are not much, but they are the best other sex we have.

• Drama is life with the dull bits left out.

• Anybody who sees and paints a sky green and pastures blue ought to be sterilized.
• What luck for the rulers that men do not think.
• I shall give a propagandist reason for starting the war, no matter whether it is plausible or not. The victor will not be asked afterwards whether he told them the truth or not. When starting and waging war it is not right that matters, but victory.

• (On his deathbed) "Now I am about to take my last voyage, a frightful leap in the dark."

• The really big-time crooks don’t break laws. ... They make them.
• The law shouldn’t legalize for government what would be considered criminal if done by anyone else.
• There’s a sucker born-again every minute.

• When we lose our individual independence in the corporateness of a mass movement, we find a new freedom--freedom to hate, bully, lie, torture, murder, and betray without shame and remorse. Herein undoubtedly lies part of the attractiveness of a mass movement.
• It is easier to love humanity as a whole than to love one's neighbor.

• Shall it be in the revealed religions, that we shall draw up our idea of virtue? Alas! do they not all appear to be in accord in announcing a despotic, jealous, vindictive, and selfish God, who knows no law, who follows his caprice in everything, who loves or who hates, who chooses or reproves, according to his whim; who acts irrationally, who delights in carnage, rapine, and crime; who plays with his feeble subjects, who overloads them with puerile laws, who lays continual snares for them, who rigorously prohibits them from consulting their reason? What would become of morality, if men proposed to themselves such Gods as models?
• Nature says to man, thou art free, no power on earth can legitimately deprive thee of thy rights; religion cries out to him, that he is a slave, condemned by his God to groan all his life under the iron rod of his representatives, Nature tells man to love the country which gave him birth, to serve it faithfully ...; religion orders him to obey, without murmuring, the tyrants who oppress his country, to serve them against it ... Nevertheless, if the sovereign be not sufficiently devoted to his priests, religion quickly changes its language; it calls upon subjects to become rebels, it makes it a duty in them to resist their master, it cries out to them, that it is better to obey God than man.

• No one can disgrace us but ourselves.

• On the whole, I am on the side of the unregenerate who affirm life as an end in itself, and against the saints who deny it.
• You never need think you can turn over any old falsehood without a terrible squirming of the horrid little population that dwells under it.
• The right of private property, the fruit of labor or industry, or of concession or donation by others, is an incontrovertible natural right; and everybody can dispose reasonably of such property as he thinks fit.
• How many people live on the reputation of the reputation they might have made!
• Science is the topography of ignorance.
• The man who is always worrying whether or not his soul would be damned generally has a soul that isn't worth a damn.

• Older men declare war. But it is youth that must fight and die.

• Instead of loving your enemies, treat your friends a little better.
• That the politicians are permitted to carry on the same old type of disgraceful campaign from year to year is as insulting to the people as would be a gang of thieves coming back to a town they had robbed, staging a parade, and inviting citizens to fall in and cheer.

• The way of the world is to praise dead saints, and persecute living ones.

• He who sleeps in continual noise is wakened by silence.

• If you lose an argument, you can still call your opponent names.
• The greatest mistake you can make in this life is to be continually fearing you will make one.
• Power flows to the man who knows how.
• One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man.
• Man's greatest blunder has been in trying to make peace with the skies instead of making peace with his neighbors.
• We are not punished for our sins, but by them.
• The object of teaching a child is t' enable him to get along without his teacher.
• Theology is an attempt to explain a subject by men who do not understand it. The intent is not to tell the truth but to satisfy the questioner.

• It would be a swell world if everybody was as pleasant as the fellow who's trying to skin you.
• A sympathizer is a fellow that's for you as long as it doesn't cost anything.
• Th' feller that calls you "brother" generally wants something that don't belong to him.
• The fellow that tries to commit suicide with a razor, and fails, would fail at anything.
• Nobuddy ever fergits where he burried the hatchet.
• It's goin' t' be fun t' watch an' see how long th' meek kin keep th' earth after they inherit it.
• The only way to entertain some folks is to listen to them.
• There's too many folks of limited means who think that nothing's too good for them.
• Classical music is the kind we keep hoping will turn into a tune.
• The less a statesman amounts to, the more he loves the flag.
• Peace has its victories no less than war, but it doesn't have as many monuments t' unveil.
• Don't a fellow feel good when he gets out of a store where he nearly bought something?
• Folks that blurt out just what they think wouldn't be so bad if they thought. Women are just like elephants to me; I like to look at them, but I wouldn't want one.

• Melancholy is the pleasure of being sad.

• Sacrifice. Something the Israelites did to goats, wasn't it?

• Nothing appears more surprising to those who consider human affairs with a philosophical eye, than the ease with which the many are governed by the few.

• The Civil War represents the simultaneous culmination and repudiation of the American Revolution.

• Does not every change from a state of nature into government more or less deprive us of the rights we enjoyed as men?

• As long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, the Caesars and Napoleons will duly rise and make them miserable.

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