Many a true word is spoken in jest.

Only one man in a thousand is a leader of men—the other 999 follow women.

Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe.

Heaven goes by favor. If it went by merit, you would stay out and your dog would go in.

Know yourself. Don't accept your dog's admiration as conclusive evidence that you are wonderful.

Noise proves nothing. Often a hen who has merely laid an egg crackles as if she had laid an asteroid.

There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods. And this seems to be the final revolution.

Never was a government that was not composed of liars, malefactors and thieves.

He who knows nothing is closer to the truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors.

The truth has no defense against a fool determined to believe a lie.

Knowledge rests not upon truth alone, but upon error also.

Re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul; and your very flesh shall be a great poem, and have the richest fluency, not only in its words, but in the silent lines of its lips and face, and between the lashes of your eyes, and in every motion and joint of your body.

The quick pain of truth can pass away, but the slow eating agony of a lie is never lost.

We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office.