Writer

Unquestionably, there is progress. The average American now pays out twice as much in taxes as he formerly got in wages.

It doesn't take a majority to make a rebellion; it takes only a few determined leaders and a sound cause.

Bachelors know more about women than married men; if they didn't they'd be married too.

I confess I enjoy democracy immensely. It is incomparably idiotic, and hence incomparably amusing.

Immorality: the morality of those who are having a better time.

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

Life is a dead-end street.

A politician is an animal which can sit on a fence and yet keep both ears to the ground.

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

We are here and it is now. Further than that, all human knowledge is moonshine.

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.

Wealth - any income that is at least one hundred dollars more a year than the income of one's wife's sister's husband.

All government, of course, is against liberty.

Each party steals so many articles of faith from the other, and the candidates spend so much time making each other's speeches, that by the time election day is past there is nothing much to do save turn the sitting rascals out and let a new gang in.

The common argument that crime is caused by poverty is a kind of slander on the poor.

Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.

Nine times out of ten, in the arts as in life, there is actually no truth to be discovered; there is only error to be exposed.

Women always excel men in that sort of wisdom which comes from experience. To be a woman is in itself a terrible experience.

Judge: a law student who marks his own examination-papers.

Poetry has done enough when it charms, but prose must also convince.