Over 40,000 Famous Quotes Sorted By Topic and Author

Demagogue: one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots.

Of government, at least in democratic states, it may be said briefly that it is an agency engaged wholesale, and as a matter of solemn duty, in the performance of acts which all self-respecting individuals refrain from as a matter of common decency.

Democracy is the art of running the circus from the monkey cage.

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.

All I ask is equal freedom. When it is denied, as it always is, I take it anyhow.

The only kind of freedom that the mob can imagine is freedom to annoy and oppress its betters, and that is precisely the kind that we mainly have.

I believe there is a limit beyond which free speech cannot go, but it's a limit that's very seldom mentioned. It's the point where free speech begins to collide with the right to privacy. I don't think there are any other conditions to free speech. I've got a right to say and believe anything I please, but I haven't got a right to press it on anybody else. .... Nobody's got a right to be a nuisance to his neighbors.

The kind of man who wants the government to adopt and enforce his ideas is always the kind of man whose ideas are idiotic.

Government, in its very essence, is opposed to all increase in knowledge. Its tendency is always towards permanence and against change...he progress of humanity, far from being the result of government, has been made entirely without its aid and in the face if its constant and bitter opposition.

All government, in its essence, is organized exploitation, and in virtually all of its existing forms it is the implacable enemy of every industrious and well-disposed man.

The worst government is the most moral. One composed of cynics is often very tolerant and humane. But when fanatics are on top there is no limit to oppression.

People constantly speak of "the government" doing this or that, as they might speak of God doing it. But the government is really nothing but a group of men, and usually they are very inferior men. They may have some better man working for them, but they themselves are seldom worthy of any respect.

The New Deal began, like the Salvation Army, by promising to save humanity. It ended, again like the Salvation Army, by running flop-houses and disturbing the peace.

The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it.

Progress is the process whereby the human race is getting rid of whiskers, the veriform appendix and God.

The true function of art is to...edit nature and so make it coherent and lovely. The artist is a sort of impassioned proofreader, blue-penciling the bad spelling of God.

It is only doubt that creates. It is only the minority that counts.

Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.

There is only one honest impulse at the bottom of Puritanism, and that is the impulse to punish the man with a superior capacity for happiness.

Any man who inflicts the human race with ideas must be prepared to see them misunderstood.