One is often kept in the right road by a rut.

God shows his contempt for wealth by the kind of person he selects to receive it.

Sic transit gloria mundi. [So passes away the glory of this world.]

Practical people would be more practical if they would take a little more time for dreaming.

[Sir Stafford Cripps] has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire.

To be patriotic, hate all nations but your own; to be religious, all sects but your own; to be moral, all pretenses but your own.

A conservative is a man who believes that nothing should be done for the first time.

It is a lesson which all history teaches wise men, to put trust in ideas, and not in circumstances.

I have just enough white in me to make my honesty questionable.

Remark of Dr. Baldwin's concerning upstarts: We don't care to eat toadstools that think they are truffles.

Sho' they got to have it against the law. Shoot, ever'body git high, they wouldn't be nobody git up and feed the chickens. Hee-hee.

Those who have some means think that the most important thing in the world is love. The poor know that it is money.

The plot was designed in a light vein that somehow became varicose.

I don't mind arguing with myself. It's when I lose that it bothers me.

Piece of cake!

Another such victory over the Romans, and we are undone.

We know next to nothing about virtually everything. It is not necessary to know the origin of the universe; it is necessary to want to know. Civilization depends not on any particular knowledge, but on the disposition to crave knowledge.

Confucius say too much.

You know very well that whether you are on page one or page thirty depends on whether [the press] fear you. It is just as simple as that.

Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.

You should never wear your best trousers when you go out to fight for freedom and liberty.

The ripest fruit falls first.

The first rule of intelligent tinkering is to save all the parts.

If a man slept by day, he had little time to work. That was a satisfying notion to Escargot.

Never have so many understood so little about so much.

Let others praise ancient times; I am glad I was born in these.

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

No excellent soul is exempt from a mixture of madness.

All the taxes paid over a lifetime by the average American are spent by the government in less than a second.

I'm fed up to the ears with old men dreaming up wars for young men to die in.

Talking much about oneself can also be a means to conceal oneself.

Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose.

Even if you do learn to speak correct English, whom are you going to speak it to?

Ignorance is the Mother of Devotion.

Nothing recedes like success.

To think contrary to one's era is heroism. But to speak against it is madness.

... Let me tell you who the actual "front-runners" are. On one side, you have George Bush, who is currently going through a sort of fraternity hazing wherein he has to perform a series of humiliating stunts to win the approval of the Republican Righ

The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization.

Don't go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first.

Once the toothpaste is out of the tube, it's hard to get it back in.

We cannot do everything at once, but we can do something at once.

When properly administered, vacations do not diminish productivity: for every week you're away and get nothing done, there's another when your boss is away and you get twice as much done.

If reporters don't know that truth is plural, they ought to be lawyers.

The human instinct to censor thrives, as it always will, living in irrepressible conflict with the human instinct to speak. Outrage, self-righteousness, and paranoia feed the maw of censorship. Squelching speech, however, never reduces society's net

Were it not for the presence of the unwashed and the half-educated, the formless, queer and incomplete, the unreasonable and absurd, the infinite shapes of the delightful human tadpole, the horizon would not wear so wide a grin.

One of the pleasures of reading old letters is the knowledge that they need no answer.

There is nothing wrong with Southern California that a rise in the ocean level wouldn't cure.

One man's Mede is another man's Persian.

Diplomacy is about surviving until the next century. Politics is about surviving until Friday afternoon.

Bond reflected that good Americans were fine people and that most of them seemed to come from Texas.

Democracy is a form of government that substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few.

Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.

It's better to be quotable than to be honest.

I will make you shorter by the head.

of the time.

Life is like a 10 speed bicycle. Most of us have gears we never use.

The best executive is one who has sense enough to pick good people to do what he wants done, and self-restraint enough to keep from meddling with them while they do it.

Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.

The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of a mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one.

The most costly of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind.

Plots are like girdles. Hidden, they hold your interest; revealed, they're of no interest except to fetishists. Like girdles, they attempt to contain an uncontainable experience.

Anyone who has had a bull by the tail knows five or six more things than someone who hasn't.

If I had done everything I'm credited with, I'd be speaking to you from a laboratory jar at Harvard.

Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.

If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.

Term, holidays, term, holidays, till we leave school, and then work, work, work till we die.

Then there's the story of the man who avoided reality for 70 years with drugs, sex, alcohol, fantasy, TV, movies, records, a hobby, lots of sleep... And on his 80th birthday died without ever having faced any of his real problems. The man's young

Two heads are better than one.

The price of seeking to force our beliefs on others is that someday they might force their beliefs on us.

A countryman between two lawyers is like a fish between two cats.

Life is like a sewer. What you get out of it depends on what you put into it.

What passes for optimism is most often the effect of an intellectual error.

I remember when legal used to mean lawful, now it means some kind of loophole.

Mike: "The Fourth Dimension is a shambles?" Bernie: "Nobody ever empties the ashtrays. People are SO inconsiderate."

Our swords shall play the orators for us.

XXI: It's easy to get a loan unless you need it. XXII: If stock market experts were so expert, they would be buying stock, not selling advice. XXIII: Any task can be completed in only one-third more time than is currently estimated. XXIV:

Diplomacy is the art of saying "nice doggie" until you can find a rock.

There are people so addicted to exaggeration that they can't tell the truth without lying.

In "King Henry VI, Part II," Shakespeare has Dick Butcher suggest to his fellow anti-establishment rabble-rousers, "The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers." That action may be extreme but a similar sentiment was expressed by Thomas K. Co

If you mess with a thing long enough, it'll break.

Authors (and perhaps columnists) eventually rise to the top of whatever depths they were once able to plumb.

He that teaches himself has a fool for a master.

Life is the living you do, Death is the living you don't do.

Ah, but a man's grasp should exceed his reach, Or what's a heaven for ?

The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.

I have the simplest tastes. I am always satisfied with the best.

When the sun shineth, make hay.

In a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence ... in time every post tends to be occupied by an employee who is incompetent to carry out its duties ... Work is accomplished by those employees who have not yet reached their

A journey of a thousand miles starts under one's feet.

A woman takes off her claim to respect along with her garments.

A woman who is guided by the head and not by the heart is a social pestilence: she has all the defects of the passionate and affectionate woman, with none of her compensations; she is without pity, without love, without virtue, without sex.

All generalizations are false, including this one.

If I had any humility I would be perfect.

If you've seen one redwood, you've seen them all.

Practice yourself what you preach.

I have made mistakes but I have never made the mistake of claiming that I have never made one.

He who laughs has not yet heard the bad news.

Politicians should read science fiction, not westerns and detective stories.

Save the Whales

Events are not affected, they develop.

I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

I respect faith, but doubt is what gives you an education.

I didn't believe in reincarnation in any of my other lives. I don't see why I should have to believe in it in this one.

If built in great numbers, motels will be used for nothing but illegal purposes.

Only kings, presidents, editors, and people with tapeworms have the right to use the editorial "we".

The only excuse for God is that he doesn't exist.

The introduction of a new kind of music must be shunned as imperiling the whole state, for styles of music are never disturbed without affecting the most important political institutions. ... The new style, gradually gaining a lodgement, quitely ins

"If we relied conclusively on scientific data for every one of our findings, I'm afraid all of our work would be inconclusive."

The only thing to do with good advice is pass it on. It is never any use to oneself.

The true way goes over a rope which is not stretched at any great height but just above the ground. It seems more designed to make people stumble than to be walked upon.

Every country has the government it deserves.

A myth is a religion in which no-one any longer believes.

If all the world's a stage, I want to operate the trap door.

More people are flattered into virtue than bullied out of vice.