Famous Quotes Name H

Doubtless criticism was originally benignant, pointing out the beauties of a work rather that its defects. The passions of men have made it malignant, as a bad heart of Procrustes turned the bed, the symbol of repose, into an instrument of torture.

Half of the secular unrest and dismal, profane sadness of modern society comes from the vain ideas that every man is bound to be a critic for life.

When dealing with the insane, the best method is to pretend to be sane.

The best years are the forties; after fifty a man begins to deteriorate, but in the forties he is at the maximum of his villainy.

New York: A third-rate Babylon.

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

College football would be more interesting if the faculty played instead of the students - there would be a great increase in broken arms, legs and necks.

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

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

A good politician is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar.

It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics or chemistry.

Democracy is the art of running the circus from the monkey cage.

Puritanism is the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.

Jury: a group of twelve men who, having lied to the judge about their hearing, health and business engagements, have failed to fool him.

The worshiper is the father of the gods.

Archbishop: a Christian ecclesiastic of a rank superior to that attained by Christ.

Self-respect: the secure feeling that no one, as yet, is suspicious.

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

It is even harder for the average ape to believe that he has descended from man.

Every man is thoroughly happy twice in his life: just after he has met his first love, and just after he has left his last one.

The basic fact about human existence is not that it is a tragedy, but that it is a bore.

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

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

Marriage is a wonderful institution, but who would want to live in an institution.

Adultery is the application of democracy to love.

Henry James would have been vastly improved as a novelist by a few whiffs of the Chicago stockyard.

The capacity of human beings to bore one another seems to be vastly greater than that of any other animals.

No normal man ever fell in love after thirty when the kidneys begin to disintegrate.

Lawer: one who protects us against robbery by taking away the temptation.

The cynics are right nine times out of ten.

It is inaccurate to say I hate everything. I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty, and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible for public office.

Historian: an unsuccessful novelist.

Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.

When women kiss, it always reminds me of prizefighters shaking hands.

To be in love is merely to be in a state of perceptual anesthesia.

If I ever marry, it will be on a sudden impulse - as a man shoots himself.

I detest converts almost as much as I do missionaries.

Love: The delusion that one woman differs from another.

Alimony: the ransom the happy pay to the devil.

The cosmos is a gigantic flywheel making 10,000 revolutions per minute. Man is a sick fly taking a dizzy ride on it.

The chief contribution of Protestantism to human thought is its massive proof that God is a bore.

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.

The penalty for laughing in a courtroom is six months in jail; if it were not for this penalty, the jury would never hear the evidence.

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

Sunday: A day given over by Americans to wishing they were dead and in heaven, and that their neighbors were dead and in hell.

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

Men are the only animals that devote themselves, day in and day out, to making one another unhappy. It is an art like any other. Its virtuosi are called altruists.

Love is the delusion that one woman differs from another

In this world of sin and sorrow there is always something to be thankful for; as for me, I rejoice that I am not a Republican.

He marries best who puts it off until it is too late.

Man is a natural polygamist: he always has one woman leading him by the nose, and another hanging on to his coattails.

Judge: a law student who marks his own papers.

Men have a much better time of it than women; for one thing, they marry later; for another thing they die earlier.