A liberal is a man too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel.

The Law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich, as well as the poor, to sleep under the bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.

Well, here it is, 1983, so it won't be long before you start reading a lot of boring stories about people like Vance Hartke. Hartke is a governor or mayor or something from one of the flatter states, and the reason you'll be reading about him is tha

Being a woman is a terribly difficult trade, since it consists principally of dealings with men.

All of the true things I am about to tell you are shameless lies.

"My country, right or wrong" is a thing that no patriot would think of saying, except in a desperate case. It is like saying "My mother, drunk or sober."

Usually, when a lot of men get together, it's called a war.

Instead of giving money to found colleges to promote learning, why don't they pass a constitutional amendment prohibiting anybody from learning anything? If it works as good as the Prohibition one did, why, in five years we would have the smartest r

Two wrongs are only the beginning.

Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mind- bogglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as a final and clinching proof of the non-existence of God. The argument follows:

I dread success. To have succeeded is to have finished one's business on earth, like the male spider, who is killed by the female the moment he has succeeded in his courtship. I like a state of continual becoming, with a goal in front and not behin

Nasrudin returned to his village from the imperial capital, and the villagers gathered around to hear what had passed. "At this time," said Nasrudin, "I only want to say that the King spoke to me." All the villagers but the stupidest ran off to spr

"The jig's up, Elman." "Which jig?"

Love may laugh at locksmiths, but he has a profound respect for money bags.

The whole world is a scab. The point is to pick it constructively.

Tax reform means "Don't tax you, don't tax me, tax that fellow behind the tree."

When a place gets crowded enough to require ID's, social collapse is not far away. It is time to go elsewhere. The best thing about space travel is that it made it possible to go elsewhere.

We all live in a state of ambitious poverty.

But you shall not escape my iambics.

Whoever has lived long enough to find out what life is, knows how deep a debt of gratitude we owe to Adam, the first great benefactor of our race. He brought death into the world.

Then, gently touching my face, she hesitated for a moment as her incredible eyes poured forth into mine love, joy, pain, tragedy, acceptance, and peace. "'Bye for now," she said warmly.

The best case: Get salary from America, build a house in England, live with a Japanese wife, and eat Chinese food. Pretty good case: Get salary from England, build a house in America, live with a Chinese wife, and eat Japanese food. The wo

Why does a hearse horse snicker, hauling a lawyer away?

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

The adjective is the banana peel of the parts of speech.

The only way I can lose this election is if I'm caught in bed with a dead girl or a live boy.

The greatest productive force is human selfishness.

I was gratified to be able to answer promptly, and I did. I said I didn't know.

"MOKE DAT YIGARETTE"

A classic is something that everyone wants to have read and nobody wants to read.

The marriage of Marxism and feminism has been like the marriage of husband and wife depicted in English common law: Marxism and feminism are one, and that one is marxism.

In the future, there will be fewer but better Russians.

Andrea: Unhappy the land that has no heroes. Galileo: No, unhappy the land that _____needs heroes.

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.

Every man thinks God is on his side. The rich and powerful know that he is.

If at first you don't succeed, try, try again.

With Congress, every time they make a joke it's a law; and every time they make a law it's a joke.

Rebellion lay in his way, and he found it.

With her body, woman is more sincere than man; but with her mind she lies. And when she lies, she does not believe herself.

The whole religious complexion of the modern world is due to the absence from Jerusalem of a lunatic asylum.

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.

The great question that has never been answered and which I have not yet been able to answer despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul is: WHAT DOES A WOMAN WANT?

... A solemn, unsmiling, sanctimonious old iceberg who looked like he was waiting for a vacancy in the Trinity.

With all the talent around, it's sort of amazing that a woman could be up here with us.

A political man can have as his aim the realization of freedom, but he has no means to realize it other than through violence.

"What's this? Trix? Aunt! Trix? You? You're after the prize! What is it?" He picked up the box and studied the back. "A glow-in-the-dark squid! Have you got it out of there yet?" He tilted the box, angling the little colored balls of cereal

The price of success in philosophy is triviality.

An older student came to Otis and said, "I have been to see a great number of teachers and I have given up a great number of pleasures. I have fasted, been celibate and stayed awake nights seeking enlightenment. I have given up everything I was aske

Fame lost its appeal for me when I went into a public restroom and an autograph seeker handed me a pen and paper under the stall door.

The liberals can understand everything but people who don't understand them.

I am a friend of the working man, and I would rather be his friend than be one.

Getting into trouble is easy.

Look before you leap.

Every man who has reached even his intellectual teens begins to suspect that life is no farce; that it is not genteel comedy even; that it flowers and fructifies on the contrary out of the profoundest tragic depths of the essential death in which its

You'd better smile when they watch you, smile like you're in control.

Consider well the proportions of things. It is better to be a young June-bug than an old bird of paradise.

We are all worms. But I do believe I am a glowworm.

Likewise, the national appetizer, brine-cured herring with raw onions, wins few friends, Germans excepted.

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

All phone calls are obscene.

The fashion wears out more apparel than the man.

San Francisco isn't what it used to be, and it never was.

Rascal, am I? Take THAT!

We have art that we do not die of the truth.

Who goeth a-borrowing goeth a-sorrowing.

The first sign of corruption in a society that is still alive is that the end justifies the means.

Look, we trade every day out there with hustlers, deal-makers, shysters, con-men. That's the way businesses get started. That's the way this country was built.

Beggars should be no choosers.

What excuses stand in your way? How can you eliminate them?

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

We are governed not by armies and police but by ideas.

Imagine there's no heaven... it's easy if you try.

I value kindness to human beings first of all, and kindness to animals. I don't respect the law; I have a total irreverence for anything connected with society except that which makes the roads safer, the beer stronger, the food cheaper, and old men

She cried, and the judge wiped her tears with my checkbook.

Education is what survives when what has been learnt has been forgotten.

"I understand this is your first dead client," Sabian was saying. The absurdity of the statement made me want to laugh but they don't call me Deadpan Allie and lie.

All things that are, are with more spirit chased than enjoyed.

... but as records of courts and justice are admissible, it can easily be proved that powerful and malevolent magicians once existed and were a scourge to mankind. The evidence (including confession) upon which certain women were convicted of witch

If two people love each other, there can be no happy end to it.

Money can't buy happiness, but it can make you awfully comfortable while you're being miserable.

There's nothing to writing. All you do is sit at a typewriter and open a vein.

Coincidences are spiritual puns.

"I can remember when a good politician had to be 75 percent ability and 25 percent actor, but I can well see the day when the reverse could be true."

Reality is bad enough, why should I tell the truth?

The divinity of Jesus is made a convenient cover for absurdity. Nowhere in the Gospels do we find a precept for Creeds, Confessions, Oaths, Doctrines, and whole carloads of other foolish trumpery that we find in Christianity.

Let us never negotiate out of fear, but let us never fear to negotiate.

When you are at Rome live in the Roman style; when you are elsewhere live as they live elsewhere.

What kind of sordid business are you on now? I mean, man, whither goest thou? Whither goest thou, America, in thy shiny car in the night?

October. This is one of the peculiarly dangerous months to speculate in stocks in. The others are July, January, September, April, November, May, March, June, December, August, and February.

[Nuclear war] ... may not be desirable.

Whom the mad would destroy, first they make Gods.

If you give Congress a chance to vote on both sides of an issue, it will always do it.

United Nations, New York, December 25. The peace and joy of the Christmas season was marred by a proclamation of a general strike of all the military forces of the world. Panic reigns in the hearts of all the patriots of every persuasion. Meanwhil

Never try to teach a pig to sing. It wastes your time and annoys the pig.

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

Education is the process of casting false pearls before real swine.

The lawgiver, of all beings, most owes the law allegiance. He of all men should behave as though the law compelled him. But it is the universal weakness of mankind that what we are given to administer we presently imagine we own.

It was a female that drove me to drink and I didn't even have the kindness to thank her.

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.

Traveling through hyperspace isn't like dusting crops, boy.

If the Nazis had television with satellite technology, we'd all be goose-stepping. Americans are just as suggestible.

It's hard to drive at the limit, but it's harder to know where the limits are.

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

I recognize terror as the finest emotion and so I will try to terrorize the reader. But if I find that I cannot terrify, I will try to horrify, and if I find that I cannot horrify, I'll go for the gross-out.

For certain people, after fifty, litigation takes the place of sex.

For a light heart lives long.

After the ground war began, captured Iraqi soldiers said any of them caught by superiors wearing a white T-shirt would be executed because of the ease with which the shirts could be used as surrender flags. Some Iraqi soldiers carried bleach with th

Another day, another dollar.

Hollywood is where if you don't have happiness you send out for it.

He thought of Musashi, the Sword Saint, standing in his garden more than three hundred years ago. "What is the 'Body of a rock'?" he was asked. In answer, Musashi summoned a pupil of his and bid him kill himself by slashing his abdomen with a knife.

A vacuum is a hell of a lot better than some of the stuff that nature replaces it with.

According to the Rand McNally Places-Rated Almanac, the best place to live in America is the city of Pittsburgh. The city of New York came in twenty-fifth. Here in New York we really don't care too much. Because we know that we could beat up their

Too often I find that the volume of paper expands to fill the available briefcases.

What you want, what you're hanging around in the world waiting for, is for something to occur to you.

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

Smartness runs in my family. When I went to school I was so smart my teacher was in my class for five years.

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending t

It is not enough that I should succeed. Others must fail.

Confucius say too much.

The meek shall inherit the earth, but *not* its mineral rights.

If any demonstrator ever lays down in front of my car, it'll be the last car he ever lays down in front of.

I place economy among the first and most important virtues, and public debt as the greatest of dangers to be feared. To preserve our independence, we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. If we run into such debts, we must be taxed i

You can't play your friends like marks, kid.

Imitation is the sincerest form of television.

Alas, I am dying beyond my means.

Praise the sea; on shore remain.

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.

The 'A' is for content, the 'minus' is for not typing it. Don't ever do this to my eyes again.

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

It is easier to be a "humanitarian" than to render your own country its proper due; it is easier to be a "patriot" than to make your community a better place to live in; it is easier to be a "civic leader" than to treat your own family with loving un

You mentioned your name as if I should recognize it, but beyond the obvious facts that you are a bachelor, a solicitor, a freemason, and an asthmatic, I know nothing whatever about you.

And what accomplished villains these old engineers were! What diabolical ways to sabotage they found! Nikolai Karlovich von Meck, of the People's Comissariat of Railroads ... would hold forth for hours on end about the economic problems involved in

Under any conditions, anywhere, whatever you are doing, there is some ordinance under which you can be booked.

She applies her lipstick in spite of its contents: "greasy rouge, containing crushed and dried insect corpses for coloring, beeswax for stiffness, and olive oil to help it flow - the latter having the unfortunate tendency to go rancid several hours a