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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.

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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.

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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.

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

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

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

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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.

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

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

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

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