We are going to have peace even if we have to fight for it.

One of the large consolations for experiencing anything unpleasant is the knowledge that one can communicate it.

A fake fortuneteller can be tolerated. But an authentic soothsayer should be shot on sight. Cassandra did not get half the kicking around she deserved.

How can you govern a nation which has 246 kinds of cheese?

Here's to women. Would that we could fall into her arms without falling into her hands.

I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forego their use.

If you can't say anything good about someone, sit right here by me.

Women are nothing but machines for producing children.

If you have to ask what jazz is, you'll never know.

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.

You can have peace. Or you can have freedom. Don't ever count on having both at once.

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

Whom the mad would destroy, first they make Gods.

When the speaker and he to whom he is speaks do not understand, that is metaphysics.

The Russians have put a small ball up in the air. That does not raise my apprehensions one iota.

Exceptions prove the rule, and wreck the budget.

Washington [D.C.] is a city of Southern efficiency and Northern charm.

In any country there must be people who have to die. They are the sacrifices any nation has to make to achieve law and order.

A woman occasionally is quite a serviceable substitute for masturbation. It takes an abundance of imagination, to be sure.

"That's no answer," Job said, "And for someone who's supposed to be omnipotent, let me tell you 'tabernacle' has only one l."

Why isn't there a special name for the tops of your feet?

Life is a hospital in which every patient is possessed by the desire to change his bed.

I'm going to Vietnam at the request of the White House. President Johnson says a war isn't really a war without my jokes.

Certainly the game is rigged. Don't let that stop you; if you don't bet, you can't win.

Doctors and lawyers must go to school for years and years, often with little sleep and with great sacrifice to their first wives.

Robert Kennedy's 1964 Senatorial campaign planners told him that their intention was to present him to the television viewers as a sincere, generous person. "You going to use a double?" asked Kennedy. Thumbing through a promotional pamphlet prep

No matter whether th' constitution follows th' flag or not, th' supreme court follows th' iliction returns.

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

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

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

per year.

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

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

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

There is no such thing as inner peace. There is only nervousness or death. Any attempt to prove otherwise constitutes unacceptable behaviour.

If Beethoven's Seventh Symphony is not by some means abridged, it will soon fall into disuse.

Either I'm dead or my watch has stopped.

How can you prove whether at this moment we are sleeping, and all our thoughts are a dream; or whether we are awake, and talking to one another in the waking state?

When the English language gets in my way, I walk over it.

America is a stronger nation for the ACLU's uncompromising effort.

In every country and every age, the priest has been hostile to Liberty.

If the church put in half the time on covetousness that it does on lust, this would be a better world.

"Rights" is a fictional abstraction. No one has "Rights", neither machines nor flesh-and-blood. Persons... have opportunities, not rights, which they use or do not use.

The reward of a thing well done is to have done 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.

There are a lot of lies going around.... and half of them are true.

The Israelis are the Doberman pinschers of the Middle East. They treat the Arabs like postmen.

Good government never depends upon laws, but upon the personal qualities of those who govern. The machinery of government is always subordinate to the will of those who administer that machinery. The most important element of government, therefore,

Let's do it.

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

Rembrandt is not to be compared in the painting of character with our extraordinarily gifted English artist, Mr. Rippingille.

You're never too old to become younger.

I do desire we may be better strangers.

Execute every act of thy life as though it were thy last.

Anyone can do any amount of work provided it isn't the work he is supposed to be doing at the moment.

The man who sets out to carry a cat by its tail learns something that will always be useful and which never will grow dim or doubtful.

The louder he talked of his honour, the faster we counted our spoons.

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

Wagner's music is better than it sounds.

THE MX IS GOOD FOR THE ECONOMY. One important reason we have a Defense Department is that when we give it money, it spends it, which creates jobs, whereas if we left the money in the hands of civilians, we don't know what they'd do with it. Probabl

Save the Whales

"God gives burdens; also shoulders" Jimmy Carter cited this Jewish saying in his concession speech at the end of the 1980 election. At least he said it was a Jewish saying; I can't find it anywhere. I'm sure he's telling the truth though; why wo

Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing can ever be made.

Fortune Documents the Great Legal Decisions: We think that we may take judicial notice of the fact that the term "bitch" may imply some feeling of endearment when applied to a female of the canine species but that it is seldom, if ever, so used whe

Between 1950 and 1952, a bored weatherman, stationed north of Hudson Bay, left a monument that neither government nor time can eradicate. Using a bulldozer abandoned by the Air Force, he spent two years and great effort pushing boulders into a single

It's not Camelot, but it's not Cleveland, either.

Show business is just like high school, except you get paid.

History is the version of past events that people have decided to agree on.

The Least Successful Executions History has furnished us with two executioners worthy of attention. The first performed in Sydney in Australia. In 1803 three attempts were made to hang a Mr. Joseph Samuels. On the first two of these the rope snap

Political speeches are like steer horns. A point here, a point there, and a lot of bull inbetween.

You never gain something but that you lose something.

Exxon's 'Universe of Energy' tends to the peculiar rather than the humorous ... After [an incomprehensible film montage about wind and sun and rain and strip mines and] two or three minutes of mechanical confusion, the seats locomote through a short

"I gained nothing at all from Supreme Enlightenment, and for that very reason it is called Supreme Enlightenment."

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

People say I live in my own little fantasy world... well, at least they *know* me there!

Heaven and earth were created all together in the same instant, on October 23rd, 4004 B.C. at nine o'clock in the morning.

No poet or novelist wishes he was the only one who ever lived, but most of them wish they were the only one alive, and quite a number fondly believe their wish has been granted.

There are no answers, only cross-references.

The better part of valor is discretion.

Just because I turn down a contract on a guy doesn't mean he isn't going to get hit.

Chapter 1 The story so far: In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.

Liberals are the first to dump you if you con them or get into trouble. Conservatives are better. They never run out on you.

The major sin is the sin of being born.

Lassie looked brilliant, in part because the farm family she lived with was made up of idiots. Remember? One of them was always getting pinned under the tractor, and Lassie was always rushing back to the farmhouse to alert the other ones. She'd w

Most people are unable to write because they are unable to think, and they are unable to think because they congenitally lack the equipment to do so, just as they congenitally lack the equipment to fly over the moon.

Something unpleasant is coming when men are anxious to tell the truth.

The knowledge that makes us cherish innocence makes innocence unattainable.

I think... I think it's in my basement... Let me go upstairs and check.

Or you or I must yield up his life to Ahrimanes. I would rather it were you. I should have no hesitation in sacrificing my own life to spare yours, but we take stock next week, and it would not be fair on the company.

If it doesn't smell yet, it's pretty fresh.

Prizes are for children.

We were young and our happiness dazzled us with its strength. But there was also a terrible betrayal that lay within me like a Merle Haggard song at a French restaurant. [...] I could not tell the girl about the woman of the tollway, of her milk w

God instructs the heart, not by ideas, but by pains and contradictions.

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

There's no justice in this world.

The Worst Prison Guards The largest number of convicts ever to escape simultaneously from a maximum security prison is 124. This record is held by Alcoente Prison, near Lisbon in Portugal. During the weeks leading up to the escape in July 1978 th

I wish a robot would get elected president. That way, when he came to town, we could all take a shot at him and not feel too bad.

What good is it if you talk in flowers, and they think in pastry?

What you see is from outside yourself, and may come, or not, but is beyond your control. But your fear is yours, and yours alone, like your voice, or your fingers, or your memory, and therefore yours to control. If you feel powerless over your fear

"Nuclear war would really set back cable."

His mind is like a steel trap: full of mice.

Some men love truth so much that they seem to be in continual fear lest she should catch a cold on overexposure.

A lie is an abomination unto the Lord and a very present help in time of trouble.

When a man assumes a public trust, he should consider himself as public property.

Innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself.

Having nothing, nothing can he lose.

Never buy from a rich salesman.

"I have just read your lousy review buried in the back pages. You sound like a frustrated old man who never made a success, an eight-ulcer man on a four-ulcer job, and all four ulcers working. I have never met you, but if I do you'll need a new nos

My brain is my second favorite organ.

If God had really intended men to fly, he'd make it easier to get to the airport.

"Lemme show ya the odds, Sparky... In yer country, ya got 14 million black people, and 3 million white people. Now, does the name `Custer' mean anything to you?"

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

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

Already the spirit of our schooling is permeated with the feeling that every subject, every topic, every fact, every professed truth must be submitted to a certain publicity and impartiality. All proffered samples of learning must go to the same ass

Once harm has been done, even a fool understands it.

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

Art is anything you can get away with.

At twenty-six, Kate, though not promiscuous, had slept with most of the decent men in public life.

I BET WHAT HAPPENED was they discovered fire and invented the wheel on the same day. Then that night, they burned the wheel.

For 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.

Never look a gift horse in the mouth.

Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice... moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.

I went into a bar feeling a little depressed, the bartender said, "What'll you have, Bud"? I said," I don't know, surprise me". So he showed me a nude picture of my wife.

I call them as I see them. If I can't see them, I make them up.

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.

Historians have now definitely established that Juan Cabrillo, discoverer of California, was not looking for Kansas, thus setting a precedent that continues to this day.

Politics, as a practice, whatever its professions, has always been the systematic organisation of hatreds.

I shall give a propagandist reason for starting the war, no matter whether it is plausible or not. The victor will not be asked afterwards whether he told the truth or not. When starting and waging war it is not right that matters, but victory.

'Martyrdom' is the only way a person can become famous without ability.

Immature artists imitate, mature artists steal.

When your work speaks for itself, don't interrupt.

... before I could come to any conclusion it occurred to me that my speech or my silence, indeed any action of mine, would be a mere futility. What did it matter what anyone knew or ignored? What did it matter who was manager? One gets sometimes s

We have gone on piling weapon upon weapon, missile upon missile, new levels of destructiveness upon old ones. We have done this helplessly, almost involuntarily: like the victims of some sort of hypnotism, like men in a dream, like lemmings heading

In my experience, if you have to keep the lavatory door shut by extending your left leg, it's modern architecture.

Whenever people agree with me I always feel I must be wrong.

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 infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists. That is why they invented hell.

Once he had one leg in the White House and the nation trembled under his roars. Now he is a tinpot pope in the Coca-Cola belt and a brother to the forlorn pastors who belabor halfwits in galvanized iron tabernacles behind the railroad yards."

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

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.