"We should all be obliged to appear before a board every five years and justify our existence...on pain of liquidation."

"If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience."

"People exaggerate the value of things they haven't got: everybody worships truth and unselfishness because they have no experience with them"

"My opportunities were still there, nay, they multiplied tenfold; but the strength and youth to cope with them began to fail, and to need eking out with the shifty cunning of experience"

"I learned long ago, never to wrestle with a pig, you get dirty; and besides, the pig likes it."

"I can forgive Alfred Nobel for having invented dynamite, but only a fiend in human form could have invented the Nobel Prize."

"If you must hold yourself up to your children as an object lesson, hold yourself up as a warning and not an example."

"Silence is the most perfect expression of scorn."

"Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it."

"One man that has a mind and knows it can always beat ten men who haven't and don't."

"Animals are my friends... and I don't eat my friends."

"Great Britain and the United States are nations separated by a common language."

"An asylum for the sane would be empty in America."

"My father must have had some elementary education for he could read and write and keep accounts inaccurately"

"The doctor learns that if he gets ahead of the superstitions of his patients he is a ruined man; and the result is that he instinctively takes care not to get ahead of them."

"Every doctor will allow a colleague to decimate a whole countryside sooner than violate the bond of professional etiquette by giving him away."

"Life is a disease; and the only difference between one another is the stage of the disease at which he lives"

"Only Lawyers and mental defectives are automatically exempt for jury duty."

"Every man over forty is a scoundrel."

"It is the mark of a truly intelligent person to be moved by statistics."

"Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh."

"Use your health, even to the point of wearing it out. That is what it is for. Spend all you have before you die; do not outlive yourself."

"First love is only a little foolishness and a lot of curiosity."

"Love is a gross exaggeration of the difference between one person and everybody else."

"Marriage is an alliance entered into by a man who can't sleep with the window shut, and a woman who can't sleep with the window open."

"Home life is no more natural to us than a cage is natural to a cockatoo."

"A happy family is but an earlier heaven."

"If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance."

"Just do what must be done. This may not be happiness, but it is greatness."

"Youth is a wonderful thing. What a crime to waste it on children."

"Science never solves a problem without creating ten more."

"Do not waste your time on Social Questions. What is the matter with the poor is Poverty; what is the matter with the rich is Uselessness."

"Baseball has the great advantage over cricket of being sooner ended."

"The price of ability does not depend on merit, but on supply and demand."

"The lack of money is the root of all evil."

"Without art, the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable."

"Beauty is all very well at first sight; but who ever looks at it when it has been in the house three days?"

"If all the economists were laid end to end, they'd never reach a conclusion."

"Listen, I'd rather lie naked in a plowed field under an incontinent horse for a week than have to read that paragraph again!"

"In the early years of the Uprising, we survived on one meal a day of horse meat and soup, but by the end we ate only dried peas, dogs, cats and birds."

"A good strategy should dictate the right actions. Any action mustn't be impulsive, but analyzed along with all its possible outcomes. A solid plan always includes many backups and alternatives."

"I do feel responsible. He used to be able to look after himself. Now he can't. That's so different, so strange. The big question is: Is more improvement really possible, or should I stop pushing him?' [p. 153]"

"Writing, which is my form of celebration and prayer, is also my form of inquiry."

"There is a furnace in our cells, and when we breathe we pass the world through our bodies, brew it lightly, and turn it loose again, gently altered for having known us."

"They spend their whole lives yelling at the world and each other. They yell at their loved ones, they yell at their enemies, they yell at their dinner, they yell at the big bustling world."

"What sort of stewards of the future planet will today’s digital children be?"

"The senses don’t just make sense of life in bold or subtle acts of clarity, they tear reality apart into vibrant morsels and reassemble them into a meaningful pattern."

"Without memories we wouldn't know who we are, how we once were, who we'd like to be in the memorable future. We are the sum of our memories."

"You cannot believe in honor until you have achieved it, better keep yourself clean and bright; you are the window through which you must see the world"

"Man can climb to the highest summits, but he cannot dwell there long."