Serfs up!

A man's house is his castle.

Harp not on that string.

A national debt, if it is not excessive, will be to us a national blessing.

Illusion is the first of all pleasures.

What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.

For courage mounteth with occasion.

Justice is incidental to law and order.

When in doubt, use brute force.

The avoidance of taxes is the only intellectual pursuit that carries any reward.

Slaves are generally expected to sing as well as to work ... I did not, when a slave, understand the deep meanings of those rude, and apparently incoherent songs. I was myself within the circle, so that I neither saw nor heard as those without might

Fanaticism consists of redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim.

Patch griefs with proverbs.

Take the folks at Coca-Cola. For many years, they were content to sit back and make the same old carbonated beverage. It was a good beverage, no question about it; generations of people had grown up drinking it and doing the experiment in sixth gr

It took a while to surface, but it appears that a long-distance credit card may have saved a U.S. Army unit from heavy casualties during the Grenada military rescue/invasion. Major General David Nichols, Air Force ... said the Army unit was in a hous

Live fast, die young, and leave a good looking corpse.

To be great is to be misunderstood.

You can't learn too soon that the most useful thing about a principle is that it can always be sacrificed to expediency.

Let him choose out of my files, his projects to accomplish.

I don't know half of you half as well as I should like; and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve.

Must I hold a candle to my shames?

Prizes are for children.

Instead of loving your enemies, treat your friends a little better.

A man gazing at the stars is proverbially at the mercy of the puddles in the road.

What you don't know won't help you much either.

I just asked myself... what would John DeLorean do?

Star Wars is adolescent nonsense; Close Encounters is obscurantist drivel; Star Trek can turn your brains to puree of bat guano; and the greatest science fiction series of all time is Doctor Who! And I'll take you all on, one-by-one or all in a bunc

If a jury in a criminal trial stays out for more than twenty-four hours, it is certain to vote acquittal, save in those instances where it votes guilty.

This is the sort of English up with which I will not put.

By protracting life, we do not deduct one jot from the duration of death.

May you live in uninteresting times.

Life is too short to be taken seriously.

Never buy what you do not want because it is cheap; it will be dear to you.

You can always pick up your needle and move to another groove.

As to Jesus of Nazareth... I think the system of Morals and his Religion, as he left them to us, the best the World ever saw or is likely to see; but I apprehend it has received various corrupting Changes, and I have, with most of the present Dissent

If I had any humility I would be perfect.

The error of youth is to believe that intelligence is a substitute for experience, while the error of age is to believe experience is a substitute for intelligence.

Men freely believe that what they wish to desire.

He didn't run for reelection. "Politics brings you into contact with all the people you'd give anything to avoid," he said. "I'm staying home."

The sooner you make your first 5000 mistakes, the sooner you will be able to correct them.

An ambassador is an honest man sent abroad to lie and intrigue for the benefit of his country.

Playing an unamplified electric guitar is like strumming on a picnic table.

At ebb tide I wrote a line upon the sand, and gave it all my heart and all my soul. At flood tide I returned to read what I had inscribed and found my ignorance upon the shore.

The human brain is a wonderful thing. It starts working the moment you are born, and never stops until you stand up to speak in public.

I'm sorry I missed.

We could do that, but it would be wrong, that's for sure.

Long were the days of pain I have spent within its walls, and long were the nights of aloneness; and who can depart from his pain and his aloneness without regret?

Soap and education are not as sudden as a massacre, but they are more deadly in the long run.

Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.

It is convenient that there be gods, and, as it is convenient, let us believe there are.

The fact that it works is immaterial.

When you go into court you are putting your fate into the hands of twelve people who weren't smart enough to get out of jury duty.

An old Jewish man reads about Einstein's theory of relativity in the newspaper and asks his scientist grandson to explain it to him. "Well, zayda, it's sort of like this. Einstein says that if you're having your teeth drilled without Novocain, a mi

To teach is to learn twice.

If you have seen one city slum you have seen them all.

What we wish, that we readily believe.

You men out there probably think you already know how to dress for success. You know, for example, that you should not wear leisure suits or white plastic belts and shoes, unless you are going to a costume party disguised as a pig farmer vacationing

A kind of Batman of contemporary letters.

No act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted.

Somehow I reached excess without ever noticing when I was passing through satisfaction.

Work is the crab grass in the lawn of life.

A writer is congenitally unable to tell the truth and that is why we call what he writes fiction.

IV. The time required for an object to fall twenty stories is greater than or equal to the time it takes for whoever knocked it off the ledge to spiral down twenty flights to attempt to capture it unbroken. Such an object is inevitably price

The truth is rarely pure, and never simple.

The only two things that motivate me and that matter to me are revenge and guilt.

If there were a school for, say, sheet metal workers, that after three years left its graduates as unprepared for their careers as does law school, it would be closed down in a minute, and no doubt by lawyers.

I realize that the MX missile is none of our concern. I realize that the whole point of living in a democracy is that we pay professional congresspersons to concern themselves with things like the MX missile so we can be free to concern ourselves wi

The last thing one knows in constructing a work is what to put first.

An elderly man stands in line for hours at a Warsaw meat store (meat is severely rationed). When the butcher comes out at the end of the day and announces that there is no meat left, the man flies into a rage. "What is this?" he shouts. "I fought

There is an innocence in admiration; it is found in those to whom it has not yet occurred that they, too, might be admired some day.

Democrats buy most of the books that have been banned somewhere. Republicans form censorship committees and read them as a group. Republicans consume three-fourths of the rutabaga produced in the USA. The remainder is thrown out. Republicans usu

A right is not what someone gives you; it's what no one can take from you.

Nothing will dispel enthusiasm like a small admission fee.

The worst part of having success is trying to find someone who is happy for you.

If you are of the opinion that the contemplation of suicide is sufficient evidence of a poetic nature, do not forget that actions speak louder than words.

Hating the Yankees is as American as pizza pie, unwed mothers and cheating on your income tax.

Ain't no right way to do a wrong thing.

A jury consists of twelve persons chosen to decide who has the better lawyer.

The language of politics is poetry, not prose. Jackson is poetry. Cuomo is poetry. Dukakis is a word processor.

I just got off the phone with Sonny Barger [President of the Hell's Angels]. He wants me to appear as a character witness for him at his murder trial and said he'd be glad to appear as a character witness on my behalf if I ever needed one. Needless

There is a certain impertinence in allowing oneself to be burned for an opinion.

They will only cause the lower classes to move about needlessly.

If Christianity was morality, Socrates would be the Saviour.

From a certain point onward there is no longer any turning back. That is the point that must be reached.

The government [is] extremely fond of amassing great quantities of statistics. These are raised to the nth degree, the cube roots are extracted, and the results are arranged into elaborate and impressive displays. What must be kept ever in mind, how

Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.

"What the hell are you getting so upset about? I thought you didn't believe in God." "I don't," she sobbed, bursting violently into tears, "but the God I don't believe in is a good God, a just God, a merciful God. He's not the mean and stupid Go

So little time, so little to do.

She hates testicles, thus limiting the men she can admire to Democratic candidates for president.

A great empire, like a great cake, is most easily diminished at the edges.

It's not so hard to lift yourself by your bootstraps once you're off the ground.

I knew her before she was a virgin.

If you wish to be happy for one hour, get drunk. If you wish to be happy for three days, get married. If you wish to be happy for a month, kill your pig and eat it. If you wish to be happy forever, learn to fish.

Imagination is the one weapon in the war against reality.

No bird soars too high if he soars with his own wings.

You don't have to be nice to people on the way up if you're not planning on coming back down.

When I came back to Dublin I was courtmartialed in my absence and sentenced to death in my absence, so I said they could shoot me in my absence.

The worst cliques are those which consist of one man.

Maybe ain't ain't so correct, but I notice that lots of folks who ain't using ain't ain't eatin' well.

You can never do just one thing.

I like to believe that people in the long run are going to do more to promote peace than our governments. Indeed, I think that people want peace so much that one of these days governments had better get out of the way and let them have it.

Crime does not pay ... as well as politics.

A "No" uttered from deepest conviction is better and greater than a "Yes" merely uttered to please, or what is worse, to avoid trouble.

We'll try to cooperate fully with the IRS, because, as citizens, we feel a strong patriotic duty not to go to jail.

Seize the day, put no trust in the morrow!

Circumstances rule men; men do not rule circumstances.

A public debt is a kind of anchor in the storm; but if the anchor be too heavy for the vessel, she will be sunk by that very weight which was intended for her preservation.

Piece of cake!

Now, you might ask, "How do I get one of those complete home tool sets for under $4?" An excellent question. Go to one of those really cheap discount stores where they sell plastic furniture in colors visible from the planet Neptune and where they

Comparing information and knowledge is like asking whether the fatness of a pig is more or less green than the designated hitter rule."

There is no character, howsoever good and fine, but it can be destroyed by ridicule, howsoever poor and witless. Observe the ass, for instance: his character is about perfect, he is the choicest spirit among all the humbler animals, yet see what rid

An aphorism is never exactly true; it is either a half-truth or one-and-a-half truths.

Money can't buy love, but it improves your bargaining position.

Ask not for whom the Bell tolls, and you will pay only the station-to-station rate.