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.

Love is the delusion that one woman differs from another.

Strike an average between what a woman thinks of her husband a month before she marries him and what she thinks of him a year afterward, and you will have the truth about him.

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

A man may be a fool and not know it, but not if he is married.

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

No married man is genuinely happy if he has to drink worse whisky than he used to drink when he was single.

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.

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

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

Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.

I hate all sports as rabidly as a person who likes sports hates common sense.

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

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

All government, of course, is against liberty.

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

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

The theory seems to be that as long as a man is a failure he is one of God's children, but that as soon as he succeeds he is taken over by the Devil.

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

Puritanism. The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.

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

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

Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.

I never smoked a cigarette until I was nine.

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

When a new source of taxation is found it never means, in practice, that the old source is abandoned. It merely means that the politicians have two ways of milking the taxpayer where they had one before.

As the arteries grow hard, the heart grows soft.

A society made up of individuals who were all capable of original thought would probably be unendurable.

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

No one in this world, so far as I know - and I have searched the records for years, and employed agents to help me - has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people.

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

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

The only cure for contempt is counter-contempt.

I go on working for the same reason that a hen goes on laying eggs.

Adultery is the application of democracy to love.

A prohibitionist is the sort of man one couldn't care to drink with, even if he drank.

Alimony - the ransom that the happy pay to the devil.

A church is a place in which gentlemen who have never been to heaven brag about it to persons who will never get there.

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

Let's not burn the universities yet. After all, the damage they do might be worse.

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

We must be willing to pay a price for freedom.

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

It is hard for the ape to believe he descended from man.

Love is an emotion that is based on an opinion of women that is impossible for those who have had any experience with them.

Honor is simply the morality of superior men.

The opera is to music what a bawdy house is to a cathedral.

Have you ever watched a crab on the shore crawling backward in search of the Atlantic Ocean, and missing? That's the way the mind of man operates.

Man is a beautiful machine that works very badly.

Husbands never become good; they merely become proficient.