Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Imagine the Creator as a low comedian, and at once the world becomes explicable.
Say what you will about the Ten Commandments, you must always come back to the
pleasant fact that there are only ten of them.
Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth
knowing.
Hanging one scoundrel, it appears, does not deter the next. Well, what of it? The
first one is at least disposed of.
It is hard to believe that a man is telling the truth when you know that you would
lie if you were in his place.
Capitalism undoubtedly has certain boils and blotches upon it, but has it as many
as government? Has it as many as marriage? Has it as many as religion? I doubt it.
It is the only basic institution of modern man that shows any genuine health and
vigor.
Jury - A group of 12 people, who, having lied to the judge about their health,
hearing, and business engagements, have failed to fool him.
...the great artists of the world are never Puritans, and seldom respectable. No
virtuous man--that is, virtuous in the Y.M.C.A. sense--has ever painted a picture
worth looking at, or written a symphony worth hearing, or a book worth reading...
The trouble with Communism is the Communists, just as the trouble with
Christianity is the Christians.
The cosmos is a gigantic flywheel making 10,000 revolutions per minute. Man is a
sick fly taking a dizzy ride on it.
A man full of faith is simply one who has lost (or never had) the capacity for
clear and realistic thought. He is not a mere ass; he is actually ill. Worse, he
is incurable.
In this world of sin and sorrow there is always something to be thankful for. As
for me, I rejoice that I am not a Republican.
We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the
extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children
smart.
Truth would quickly cease to become stranger than fiction, once we got as used to
it.
Democracy is the art of running the circus from the monkey cage.
The basic fact about human existence is not that it is a tragedy, but that it is a
bore.
A newspaper is a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy
crazier.
It is the fundamental theory of all the more recent American law...that the
average citizen is half-witted, and hence not to be trusted to either his own
devices or his own thoughts.
A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin.
The New Deal began, like the Salvation Army, by promising to save humanity. It
ended, again like the Salvation Army, by running flop-houses and disturbing the
peace.
For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
Lawyer: One who protects us against robbery by taking away the temptation.
Misogynist - A man who hates women as much as women hate one another.
Tis more blessed to give than to receive; for example, wedding presents.
A politician is an animal which can sit on a fence and yet keep both ears to the
ground.
Jealousy: The theory that some other fellow has just as little taste.
Sunday: A day given over by Americans to wishing that they themselves were dead
and in Heaven, and that their neighbors were dead and in Hell.
Sunday School: A prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of
their parents.
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 most common of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not
true. It is the chief occupation of mankind.
Giving every man a vote has no more made men wise and free than Christianity has
made them good.
Philosophy consists very largely of one philosopher arguing that all other
philosophers are jackasses. He usually proves it, and I should add that he also
usually proves that he is one himself.
Life may not be exactly pleasant, but it is at least not dull. Heave yourself into
Hell today, and you may miss, tomorrow or next day, another Scopes trial, or
another War to End War, or perchance a rich and buxom widow with all her first
husband's clothes. There are always more Hardings hatching. I advocate hanging on
as long as possible.
The fact that I have no remedy for all the sorrows of the world is no reason for
my accepting yours. It simply supports the strong probability that yours is a
fake.
It is impossible to imagine the universe run by a wise, just and omnipotent God,
but it is quite easy to imagine it run by a board of gods. If such a board
actually exists it operates precisely like the board of a corporation that is
losing money.
The believing mind is externally impervious to evidence. The most that can be
accomplished with it is to induce it to substitute one delusion for another. It
rejects all overt evidence as wicked...
Why assume so glibly that the God who presumably created the universe is still
running it? It is certainly perfectly conceivable that He may have finished it and
then turned it over to lesser gods to operate. In the same way many human
institutions are turned over to grossly inferior men. This is true, for example,
of most universities, and of all great newspapers.
The Christian church, in its attitude toward science, shows the mind of a more or
less enlightened man of the Thirteenth Century. It no longer believes that the
earth is flat, but it is still convinced that prayer can cure after medicine
fails.
Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove
that the other party is unfit to rule--and both commonly succeed, and are right...
The United States has never developed an aristocracy really disinterested or an
intelligentsia really intelligent. Its history is simply a record of vacillations
between two gangs of frauds.
It is often argued that religion is valuable because it makes men good, but even
if this were true it would not be a proof that religion is true. That would be an
extension of pragmatism beyond endurance. Santa Claus makes children good in
precisely the same way, and yet no one would argue seriously that the fact proves
his existence. The defense of religion is full of such logical imbecilities.