Writer

Conscience is a mother-in-law whose visit never ends.

A professor must have a theory as a dog must have fleas.

A judge is a law student who marks his own examination papers.

Every man sees in his relatives, and especially in his cousins, a series of grotesque caricatures of himself.

It is hard to believe that a man is telling the truth when you know that you would lie if you were in his place.

Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.

One may no more live in the world without picking up the moral prejudices of the world than one will be able to go to hell without perspiring.

Whenever a husband and wife begin to discuss their marriage they are giving evidence at a coroner's inquest.

The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.

A man always remembers his first love with special tenderness, but after that he begins to bunch them.

Temptation is an irresistible force at work on a movable body.

For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.

An idealist is one who, on noticing that roses smell better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup.

Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing.

There is a saying in Baltimore that crabs may be prepared in fifty ways and that all of them are good.

A national political campaign is better than the best circus ever heard of, with a mass baptism and a couple of hangings thrown in.

Opera in English is, in the main, just about as sensible as baseball in Italian.

No matter how happily a woman may be married, it always pleases her to discover that there is a nice man who wishes that she were not.

The basic fact about human existence is not that it is a tragedy, but that it is a bore. It is not so much a war as an endless standing in line.

I believe that it is better to tell the truth than a lie. I believe it is better to be free than to be a slave. And I believe it is better to know than to be ignorant.