During almost fifteen centuries the legal establishment of Christianity has been upon trial. What has been its fruits? More or less, in all places, pride and indolence in the clergy; ignorance and servility in the laity,; in both, superstition, bigo

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.

... Our second completely true news item was sent to me by Mr. H. Boyce Connell Jr. of Atlanta, Ga., where he is involved in a law firm. One thing I like about the South is, folks there care about tradition. If somebody gets handed a name like "H.

Laws are like sausages. It's better not to see them being made.

The very first essential for success is a perpetually constant and regular employment of violence.

of the time.

A lot of people I know believe in positive thinking, and so do I. I believe everything positively stinks.

The Least Successful Collector Betsy Baker played a central role in the history of collecting. She was employed as a servant in the house of John Warburton (1682-1759) who had amassed a fine collection of 58 first edition plays, including most of t

He has not acquired a fortune; the fortune has acquired him.

CF&C stole it, fair and square.

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

If you don't count some of Jehovah's injunctions, there are no humorists in the Bible.

Work is the crab grass in the lawn of life.

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.

Many hands make light work.

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.

The seven deadly sins ... Food, clothing, firing, rent, taxes, respectability and children. Nothing can lift those seven milestones from man's neck but money; and the spirit cannot soar until the milestones are lifted.

A rolling stone gathers no moss.

The hardest thing in the world to understand is the income tax.

Scrubbing floors and emptying bedpans has as much dignity as the Presidency.

All this wheeling and dealing around, why, it isn't for money, it's for fun. Money's just the way we keep score.

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

I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.

"Listen to what I say, not what I mean. I mean ...."

The forest is safe because a lion lives therein and the lion is safe because it lives in a forest. Likewise the friendship of persons rests on mutual help.

"After I asked him what he meant, he replied that freedom consisted of the unimpeded right to get rich, to use his ability, no matter what the cost to others, to win advancement."

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.

Campus sidewalks never exist as the straightest line between two points.

Life sucks, but death doesn't put out at all.

American cars are made shoddily... Cars made overseas are far superior.

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

After his Ignoble Disgrace, Satan was being expelled from Heaven. As he passed through the Gates, he paused a moment in thought, and turned to God and said, "A new creature called Man, I hear, is soon to be created." "This is true," He replied.

Facts, apart from their relationships, are like labels on empty bottles.

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

Go ahead... make my day.

Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.

If little green men land in your back yard, hide any little green women you've got in the house.

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

A businessman is a hybrid of a dancer and a calculator.

I've got all the money I'll ever need if I die by 4 o'clock.

"Consequences, Schmonsequences, as long as I'm rich."

"The policeman isn't there to create disorder. The policeman is there to ________preserve disorder."

From the cradle to the coffin underwear comes first.

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.

History is nothing but a collection of fables and useless trifles, cluttered up with a mass of unnecessary figures and proper names.

Think sideways!

Why my thoughts are my own, when they are in, but when they are out they are another's.

It is generally agreed that "Hello" is an appropriate greeting because if you entered a room and said "Goodbye," it could confuse a lot of people.

When there are two conflicting versions of the story, the wise course is to believe the one in which people appear at their worst.

War hath no fury like a non-combatant.

If a thing's worth doing, it is worth doing badly.

Some men are heterosexual, and some are bisexual, and some men don't think about sex at all... they become lawyers.

Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness.

The more laws and order are made prominent, the more thieves and robbers there will be.

You can't have your cake and let your neighbor eat it too.

Adde parvum parvo manus acervus erit. [Add little to little and there will be a big pile.]

I try not to break the rules but merely to test their elasticity.

NAPOLEON: What shall we do with this soldier, Giuseppe? Everything he says is wrong. GIUSEPPE: Make him a general, Excellency, and then everything he says will be right.

"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."

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

It is Mr. Mellon's credo that $200,000,000 can do no wrong. Our offense consists in doubting it.

Writing is turning one's worst moments into money.

Call on God, but row away from the rocks.

The whole earth is in jail and we're plotting this incredible jailbreak.

We give advice, but we cannot give the wisdom to profit by it.

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

I think we're in trouble.

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.

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

I had never been too political, but I knew how white people treated black people and it was hard for me to come back to the bullshit white people put a black person through in this country. To realize you don't have any power to make things differen

Nothing succeeds like excess.

Not to laugh, not to lament, not to curse, but to understand.

You can't hold a man down without staying down with him.

Let me take you a button-hole lower.

As Gen. de Gaulle occassionally acknowledges America to be the daughter of Europe, so I am pleased to come to Yale, the daughter of Harvard.

A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.

A real diplomat is one who can cut his neighbor's throat without having his neighbour notice it.

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.

We prefer to believe that the absence of inverted commas guarantees the originality of a thought, whereas it may be merely that the utterer has forgotten its source.

The last vestiges of the old Republic have been swept away.

I have seen the future and it is just like the present, only longer.

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

Eggheads unite! You have nothing to lose but your yolks.

They also serve who only stand and wait.

You know it's Monday when you wake up and it's Tuesday.

It is easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them.

You have not converted a man because you have silenced him.

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

One measure of friendship consists not in the number of things friends can discuss, but in the number of things they need no longer mention.

I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve immortality through not dying.

An Englishman never enjoys himself, except for a noble purpose.

Anything anybody can say about America is true.

I went into the business for the money, and the art grew out of it. If people are disillusioned by that remark, I can't help it. It's the truth.

Someday we'll look back on this moment and plow into a parked car.

Piece of cake!

If the weather is extremely bad, church attendance will be down. If the weather is extremely good, church attendance will be down. If the bulletin covers are in short supply, however, church attendance will exceed all expectations.

The world is full of people who have never, since childhood, met an open doorway with an open mind.

The bone-chilling scream split the warm summer night in two, the first half being before the scream when it was fairly balmy and calm and pleasant, the second half still balmy and quite pleasant for those who hadn't heard the scream at all, but not c

We have lingered long enough on the shores of the Cosmic Ocean.

The naked truth of it is, I have no shirt.

We should realize that a city is better off with bad laws, so long as they remain fixed, then with good laws that are constantly being altered, that the lack of learning combined with sound common sense is more helpful than the kind of cleverness th

A Polish worker walks into a bank to deposit his paycheck. He has heard about Poland's economic problems, and he asks what would happen to his money if the bank collapsed. "All of our deposits are guaranteed by the finance ministry, sir," the telle

"We should declare war on North Vietnam. We could pave the whole country and put parking strips on it, and still be home by Christmas."

The superpowers often behave like two heavily armed blind men feeling their way around a room, each believing himself in mortal peril from the other, whom he assumes to have perfect vision. Each tends to ascribe to the other side a consistency, fors

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.

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

If fifty million people say a foolish thing, it's still a foolish thing.

Things are not always what they seem.

The adjuration to be "normal" seems shockingly repellent to me; I see neither hope nor comfort in sinking to that low level. I think it is ignorance that makes people think of abnormality only with horror and allows them to remain undismayed at the

Why, when no honest man will deny in private that every ultimate problem is wrapped in the profoundest mystery, do honest men proclaim in pulpits that unhesitating certainty is the duty of the most foolish and ignorant? Is it not a spectacle to make

Liberty is always dangerous, but it is the safest thing we have.

If there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life.

Speak softly and own a big, mean Doberman.

A new taste had been acquired and a new appetite began to grow. The time had long since arrived to crush the technical intelligentsia, which had come to regard itself as too irreplaceable and had not gotten used to catching instructions on the wing.

A man who cannot seduce men cannot save them either.

If a nation values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom; and the irony of it is that if it is comfort or money it values more, it will lose that, too.

Since we have to speak well of the dead, let's knock them while they're alive.

In the misfortune of our friends we find something that is not displeasing to us.

All I know is what the words know, and dead things, and that makes a handsome little sum, with a beginning and a middle and an end, as in the well-built phrase and the long sonata of the dead.

Try not to have a good time ... This is supposed to be educational.

Richard Nixon was the most dishonest individual I have ever met in my life. He lied to his wife, his family, his friends, his colleagues in the Congress, lifetime members of his own political party, the American people, and the world.

Executive ability is deciding quickly and getting somebody else to do the work.

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

If you don't have a nasty obituary you probably didn't matter.

If while you are in school, there is a shortage of qualified personnel in a particular field, then by the time you graduate with the necessary qualifications, that field's employment market is glutted.

The goys have proven the following theorem...

It seems to me that nearly every woman I know wants a man who knows how to love with authority. Women are simple souls who like simple things, and one of the simplest is one of the simplest to give. ... Our family airedale will come clear across t

Man invented language to satisfy his deep need to complain.

It is exactly because a man cannot do a thing that he is a proper judge of it.

It is indeed desirable to be well descended, but the glory belongs to our ancestors.

The white race is the cancer of history.

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

Wisdom is knowing what to do with what you know.

We should have a great many fewer disputes in the world if only words were taken for what they are, the signs of our ideas only, and not for things themselves.

Competence, like truth, beauty, and contact lenses, is in the eye of the beholder.

The public is an old woman. Let her maunder and mumble.

The problem that we thought was a problem was, indeed, a problem, but not the problem we thought was the problem.

You k'n hide de fier, but w'at you gwine do wid de smoke?

Put a rogue in the limelight and he will act like an honest man.

Fame is a vapor; popularity an accident; the only earthly certainty is oblivion.