The opinion of 10,000 men is of no value if none of them know anything about the subject.
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Dark Humor
Office satire with a pedigree: Twain, Mencken, Schopenhauer, Wilde, and company.
The object in life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.
Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful.
Much learning does not teach understanding.
Wise men speak because they have something to say; fools because they have to say something.
The society that separates its scholars from its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting by fools.
The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.
If you assign people duties without granting them any rights, you must pay them well.
Girls we love for what they are; young men for what they promise to be.
The human race is a monotonous affair. Most people spend the greatest part of their time working in order to live, and what little freedom remains so fills them with fear that they seek out any and every means to be rid of it.
None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.
If your abilities are only mediocre, modesty is mere honesty; but if you possess great talents, it is hypocrisy.
Because people have no thoughts to deal in, they deal cards, and try to win one another's money. Idiots!
Sleep is the interest we have to pay on the capital which is called in at death; and the higher the rate of interest and the more regularly it is paid, the further the date of redemption is postponed.
Every person takes the limits of their own field of vision for the limits of the world.
The wise have always said the same things, and fools, who are the majority, have always done just the opposite.
Books are like a mirror. If an ass looks in, you can't expect an angel to look out.
No rose without a thorn. But many a thorn without a rose.
The higher we soar the smaller we appear to those who cannot fly.
Hope in reality is the worst of all evils because it prolongs the torments of man.
Is not life a hundred times too short for us to bore ourselves?
The state has never any concern with truth, but only with the truth useful to it, or rather, with anything that is useful to it, be it truth, half-truth, or error.
I live in my own place, have never copied nobody even half, and at any master who lacks the grace to laugh at himself — I laugh.
In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.
He who has a thousand friends has not a friend to spare, while he who has one enemy shall meet him everywhere.
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.
We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.
To a philosopher all news, as it is called, is gossip, and they who edit and read it are old women over their tea.
Men have become the tools of their tools.
The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.
If you would persuade, you must appeal to interest rather than intellect.
Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch.
Love your enemies, for they tell you your faults.
We are all born ignorant, but one must work hard to remain stupid.
Experience is the best teacher, but a fool will learn from no other.
Most people die at twenty-five and aren't buried until they're seventy-five.
Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence in society.
If voting made any difference they wouldn't let us do it.
No amount of evidence will ever persuade an idiot.
When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much he had learned in seven years.
Never argue with stupid people. They will drag you down to their level and then beat you with experience.
If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything.
Always do right. This will gratify some people and astonish the rest.
Be respectful to your superiors, if you have any.
Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.
It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so.
Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.
Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.
The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.
Government is actually the worst failure of civilized man. There has never been a really good one, and even those that are most tolerable are arbitrary, cruel, grasping, and unintelligent.
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, most of them imaginary.
The average man doesn't want to be free. He simply wants to be safe.
Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.
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.
The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers.
The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.
Crisis is the rallying cry of the tyrant.
Your worst sin is that you have destroyed and betrayed yourself for nothing.
I gave up caring about anything, and all the problems disappeared.
Man is sometimes extraordinarily, passionately, in love with suffering.
I think the devil doesn't exist, but man has created him, he has created him in his own image and likeness.
The only intelligent tactical response to life's horror is to laugh defiantly at it.
Marry, and you will regret it; don't marry, you will also regret it; marry or don't marry, you will regret it either way.
A fire broke out backstage in a theatre. The clown came out to warn the public; they thought it was a joke and applauded. He repeated it; the acclaim was even greater. I think that's just how the world will come to an end: to general applause from wits who believe it's a joke.
If I were a father and had a daughter who became a prostitute, I should not despair over her; I would continue to hope for her salvation. But if I had a son who became a journalist and continued to be one for five years, I would give him up.
People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.
God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh.
It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.
A witty saying proves nothing.
The secret of being a bore is to tell everything.
Nothing is so firmly believed as that which we least know.
My life has been full of terrible misfortunes, most of which never happened.
All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.
We all have strength enough to endure the misfortunes of others.
Hypocrisy is the homage vice pays to virtue.
We confess our little faults only to persuade others that we have no great ones.
True love is like ghosts, which everyone talks about and few have seen.
Out, out, brief candle! Life's but a walking shadow.
How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is to have a thankless child.
Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.
Academies that are founded at the public expense are instituted not so much to cultivate men's natural abilities as to restrain them.
It is better to be feared than loved, if you cannot be both.
Men in general judge more by the eyes than by the hands, for everyone can see, but few can feel.
Life is far too important to be taken seriously.
The truth is rarely pure and never simple.
A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.
The only man I know who behaves sensibly is my tailor; he takes my measurements anew each time he sees me. The rest go on with their old measurements and expect me to fit them.
The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.
Impartiality is a pompous name for indifference, which is an elegant name for ignorance.
The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.
We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.
The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.
The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.
I know of no country in which there is so little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion as in America.
Americans are so enamored of equality that they would rather be equal in slavery than unequal in freedom.
The axe forgets; the tree remembers.
The forest was shrinking, but the trees kept voting for the axe, for the axe was clever and convinced the trees that because his handle was made of wood, he was one of them.
The amount of noise that anyone can bear undisturbed stands in inverse proportion to his mental capacity.
Men are the devils of the earth, and the animals are the tormented souls.
All zoos actually offer to the public 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.
The human race is a race of cowards; and I am not only marching in that procession but carrying a banner.
When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign: that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.
One is not superior merely because one sees the world as odious.
Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils.
No one feels another's grief, no one understands another's joy. People imagine that they can reach one another. In reality they only pass each other by.
I still hope to be able to make something of myself, but who can do anything after Beethoven?