S

• A woman who takes her husband about with her everywhere is like a cat that goes on playing with a mouse long after she's killed it.

• Slang is language that takes off its coat, spits on its hands, and goes to work. War
• Sometime they'll give a war and nobody will come.

• Fashion is something barbarous, for it produces innovation without reason and imitation without benefit.
• For an idea to be fashionable is ominous, since it must afterwards be always old-fashioned.
• Fanaticism consists in redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim.
• Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
• It is pathetic to observe how lowly are the motives that religion, even the highest, attributes to the deity, and from what hardpressed and bitter existence they have been drawn. To be given the best morsel, to be remembered, to be praised, to be obeyed blindly and punctiliously--these have been thought points of honor with the gods, for which they would dispense favors and punishments on the most exorbitant scale.
• Skepticism is the chastity of the intellect.
• A child educated only at school is an uneducated child.

• The best party is but a kind of Conspiracy against the rest of the Nation.
• They who are of the opinion that Money will do everything, may very well be suspected to do everything for Money.

• The idea of imposing restrictions on a free economy to assure freedom of competition is like breaking a man's leg to make him run faster.

• Martyrdom has always been proof of the intensity, never the correctness of a belief.

• Truth that has merely been learned is like an artificial limb, a false tooth, a waxen nose; it adheres to us only because it is put on. But truth acquired by thought of our own is like a natural limb; it alone really belongs to us.
• A man can be himself only so long as he is alone; and, if he does not love solitude, he will not love freedom; for it is only when he is alone that he is really free.

• Like witchcraft, obscenity will disappear, as we grow more healthily minded, mentally more mature, and more intelligent about sexual psychology.

• The fundamental idea of good is that it consists in preserving life, in favoring it, in wanting to bring it to its highest value, and evil consists in destroying life, doing it injury, hindering its development.
• The idea of Reverence for Life offers itself as the realistic answer to the realistic question of how man and the world are related to each other.

• Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful.

• The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers.

• Do not do unto others as you would they should do unto you; their tastes may not be the same.
• Democracy substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few.
• What really flatters a man is that you think him worth flattering.
• Heaven, as conventionally conceived, is a place so inane, so dull, so useless, so miserable, that nobody has ever ventured to describe a whole day in heaven, though plenty of people have described a day at the seaside.
• Liberty means responsibility, that is why most men dread it.
• What is virtue but the trades unionism of the married?
• Martyrdom is the only way in which a man can become famous without ability.
• Lack of money is the root of all evil.
• Smokers and nonsmokers cannot be equally free in the same railway car.
• A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.

• I do not know of a better cure for sorrow than to pity someone else.

• I am tired and sick of war. Its glory is all moonshine. It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, more vengeance, more desolation. War is hell.

• He who feasts every day, feasts no day.

• Just because I don't care doesn't mean I don't understand.

• The words men fight and die for are the coins of politics, where by much usage they are soiled and by much manipulating debased. That has evidently been the fate of the word democracy. It has come to mean whatever anyone wants it to mean.

• dieting--the act of weight control through sorrow.

• War is just one more government program.

• The unexamined life is not worth living.
• I know nothing. Of this I am certain.

• ...wherever the masses can "vote with their feet," it is almost invariably to move toward capitalist nations where intellectuals say they are alienated.

• The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly is to fill the world with fools.
• Hero worship is strongest where there is least regard for human freedom.
• Every man is free to do what he wills, provided he infringes not upon the equal freedom of any other man.
• ... to usurp property legitimately acquired is logically the same as cutting off so many hours from its producer's life.

• The way to stop war is to stop going to war; stop supporting it and it will fall, just as slavery did, just as the Inquisition did.

• A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic.

• Men tire themselves in pursuit of rest.

• The state calls its own violence law, but that of the individual crime.

• Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art.

• You have brains in your head
  You have feet in your shoes
  You can steer yourself
  any direction you choose
  You're on your own. And you know what you know.
  And YOU are the guy who'll decide where to go.

• What folly it is to believe that vice and passions are limited by classes, that liberty consists only in taking power away from nobles and priests and giving it to artisans and peasants and these latter will never abuse it!
• ... the thirst for luxurious enjoyment, when brought into connection with notions of rights, of power, and of equality, and dissociated from the notions of industry and economy, produces the notion that a man is robbed of his rights if he has not everything that he wants, and that he is deprived of equality if he sees anyone have more than he has, and that he is a fool if, having the power of the State in his hands, he allows the state of things to last.
• I suppose that the men who first said, in plain, cold assertion, there is no fountain of eternal youth, seemed to be the most cruel and cold-hearted adversaries of human happiness ... Let us put down now the cold, hard fact and look at it just as it is. There is no device whatsoever to be invented for securing happiness without industry, economy, and virtue.
• It is not the function of the State to make men happy. They must make themselves happy in their own way, and at their own risk.
• ... militarism, expansionism, and imperialism will favor the plutocrat. In the first place, war and expansion will favor jobbery both in the dependencies and at home. In the second place, they will take away the attention of people from what the plutocrats are doing. In the third place, they will cause large expenditures of the people's money, the return of which will not go into the Treasury, but into the hands of the few schemers. In the fourth place, they will call for a large public debt and taxes, and these things especially tend to make men unequal because any social burdens weigh more heavily on the weak than on the strong.
• Whenever we try to get paternalized we only succeed in getting policed.
• ...when society is blamed for the ills which belong to the human lot, it is only burdening those who have successfully contended with those ills with the further task of conquering the same ills over again for somebody else. Hence liberty perishes in all socialist schemes, and the tendency of such schemes is to the deterioration of society by burdening the good members and relieving the bad ones. The law of the survival of the fittest was not made by man and cannot be abrogated by man. We can only, be interfering with it, produce the survival of the unfittest.
• The amount of superstition is not much changed, but it now attaches to politics, not to religion.
• If we do not like the survival of the fittest, we have only one possible alternative, and that is, the survival of the unfittest. The former is the law of civilization; the latter is the law of anti-civilization.

• If a minister believes and teaches evolution, he is a skunk, a hypocrite and a liar.

• When a man of genius appears in the world, it is immediately recognized by the fact that all the blockheads join forces against him.
• We have just enough religion to hate, but not enough to make us love one another.

• Heterosexual men would be as likely as homosexual men to have sex most often with strangers, to participate in anonymous orgies in public baths, and to stop off in public restrooms for five minutes of fellatio on the way home from work, if women were interested in these activities.

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