Religion is fundamentally opposed to everything I hold in veneration - courage, clear thinking, honesty, fairness, and, above all, love of the truth
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The essence of a self-reliant and autonomous culture is an unshakeable egoism
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Freedom of the press is limited to those who own one
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Philosophy consists very largely of one philosopher arguing that all others are jackasses. He usually proves it, and I should add that he also usually proves that he is one himself
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A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin
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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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Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule - and both commonly succeed, and are right
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The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom
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For centuries, theologians have been explaining the unknowable in terms of the-not-worth-knowing
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The difference between a moral man and a man of honor is that the latter regrets a discreditable act, even when it has worked and he has not been caught
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The government consists of a gang of men exactly like you and me. They have, taking one with another, no special talent for the business of government; they have only a talent for getting and holding office
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Puritanism - the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy
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Any man who afflicts the human race with ideas must be prepared to see them misunderstood
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The one permanent emotion of the inferior man is fear - fear of the unknown, the complex, the inexplicable. What he wants above everything else is safety
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To wage a war for a purely moral reason is as absurd as to ravish a woman for a purely moral reason
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A judge is a law student who marks his own examination papers
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Conscience is the inner voice that warns us somebody may be looking
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Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard
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Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence
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Imagine the Creator as a low comedian, and at once the world becomes explicable
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Marriage is a wonderful institution, but who would want to live in an institution? by
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No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public
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The chief value of money lies in the fact that one lives in a world in which it is overestimated
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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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It is hard to believe that a man is telling the truth when you know that you would lie if you were in his place
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