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 first kiss is stolen by the man; the last is begged by the woman.

Platitude: an idea (a) that is admitted to be true by everyone, and (b) that is not true.

Giving every man a vote has no more made men wise and free than Christianity has made them good.

The chief value of money lies in the fact that one lives in a world in which it is overestimated.

Congress consists of one third, more or less, scoundrels; two thirds, more or less, idiots; and three thirds, more or less, poltroons.

Thanksgiving Day is a day devoted by persons with inflammatory rheumatism to thanking a loving Father that it is not hydrophobia.

Say what you will about the Ten Commandments, you must always come back to the pleasant fact that there are only ten of them.

War will never cease until babies begin to come into the world with larger cerebums and smaller adrenal glands.

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

All [zoos] actually offer to the public in return for the taxes spent upon them is a form of idle and witless amusement, compared to which a visit to a penitentiary, or even to a State legislature in session, is informing, stimulating and ennobling.

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

Man is never honestly the fatalist, nor even the stoic. He fights his fate, often desperately. He is forever entering bold exceptions to the rulings of the bench of gods. This fighting, no doubt, makes for human progress, for it favors the strong and the brave. It also makes for beauty, for lesser men try to escape from a hopeless and intolerable world by creating a more lovely one of their own.

...no man of genuinely superior intelligence has ever been an actor. Even supposing a young man of appreciable mental powers to be lured upon the stage, as philosophers are occasionally lured into bordellos, his mind would be inevitably and almost immediately destroyed by the gaudy nonsense issuing from his mouth every night.

And what is a good citizen? Simply one who never says, does or thinks anything that is unusual. Schools are maintained in order to bring this uniformity up to the highest possible point. A school is a hopper into which children are heaved while they are still young and tender; therein they are pressed into certain standard shapes and covered from head to heels with official rubber-stamps.

A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin.

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

It is the dull man who is always sure, and the sure man who is always dull.

Criticism is prejudice made plausible.

Misogynist: A man who hates women as much as women hate one another.

To die for an idea; it is unquestionably noble. But how much nobler it would be if men died for ideas that were true!

Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.

The government consists of a gang of men exactly like you and me. They have, taking one with another, no special talent for the business of government; they have only a talent for getting and holding office.

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.

For centuries, theologians have been explaining the unknowable in terms of the-not-worth-knowing.

Philosophy consists very largely of one philosopher arguing that all others are jackasses. He usually proves it, and I should add that he also usually proves that he is one himself.

All successful newspapers are ceaselessly querulous and bellicose. They never defend anyone or anything if they can help it; if the job is forced on them, they tackle it by denouncing someone or something else.

In the United States, doing good has come to be, like patriotism, a favorite device of persons with something to sell.

Never let your inferiors do you a favor - it will be extremely costly.

Any man who afflicts the human race with ideas must be prepared to see them misunderstood.

A home is not a mere transient shelter: its essence lies in the personalities of the people who live in it.

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.

The world always makes the assumption that the exposure of an error is identical with the discovery of truth--that the error and truth are simply opposite. They are nothing of the sort. What the world turns to, when it is cured on one error, is usually simply another error, and maybe one worse than the first one.

For it is mutual trust, even more than mutual interest that holds human associations together. Our friends seldom profit us but they make us feel safe... Marriage is a scheme to accomplish exactly that same end.

Man is never honestly the fatalist, nor even the stoic. He fights his fate, often desperately. He is forever entering bold exceptions to the rulings of the bench of gods. This fighting, no doubt, makes for human progress, for it favors the strong and the brave. It also makes for beauty, for lesser men try to escape from a hopeless and intolerable world by creating a more lovely one of their own.

All [zoos] actually offer to the public in return for the taxes spent upon them is a form of idle and witless amusement, compared to which a visit to a penitentiary, or even to a State legislature in session, is informing, stimulating and ennobling.

Say what you will about the Ten Commandments, you must always come back to the pleasant fact that there are only ten of them.

Giving every man a vote has no more made men wise and free than Christianity has made them good.

Platitude: an idea (a) that is admitted to be true by everyone, and (b) that is not true.

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.

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

The most common of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind.

A poet more than thirty years old is simply an overgrown child.

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.

The one permanent emotion of the inferior man is fear - fear of the unknown, the complex, the inexplicable. What he wants beyond everything else is safety.

Any man who afflicts the human race with ideas must be prepared to see them misunderstood.

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

Conscience is the inner voice that warns us somebody may be looking.

Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin to slit throats.

Happiness is the china shop; love is the bull.

There comes a time when a man must spit on his hands, hoist the black flag and begin slitting throats.