“A professional politician is a professionally dishonorable man. In order to get anywhere near high office he has to make so many compromises and submit to so many humiliations that he becomes indistinguishable from a streetwalker.”

You can’t do anything about the length of your life, but you can do something about its width and depth.

If a politician found he had cannibals among his constituents, he would promise them missionaries for dinner.

There are two impossibilities in life: “just one drink” and “an honest politician.”

People do not expect to find chastity in a whorehouse. Why, then, do they expect to find honesty and humanity in government, a congeries of institutions whose modus operandi consists of lying, cheating, stealing, and if need be, murdering those who resist?

Always remember this: If you don’t attend the funerals of your friends, they will certainly not attend yours.

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.

On one issue, at least, men and women agree. They both distrust women.

A sense of humor always withers in the presence of the messianic delusion, like justice and the truth in front of patriotic passion.

Love is like war: easy to begin but very hard to stop.

Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods.

Journalism is to politician as dog is to lamp-post.

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.

In this world of sin and sorrow there is always something to be thankful for; as for me, I rejoice that I am not a Republican.

A man may be a fool and not know it, but not if he is married.

The State doesn’t just want you to obey, it wants to make you WANT to obey.

The final test of truth is ridicule. Very few dogmas have ever faced it and survived.

There is a stubbornness about me that never can bear to be frightened at the will of others. My courage always rises at every attempt to intimidate me.

Once a man has tasted freedom he will never be content to be a slave.

To drive free, to love free, to court destruction with taunts, to feed the remainder of life with one hour of fullness and freedom – one brief hour of madness and joy.

Letting go gives us freedom and freedom is the only condition for happiness.

It is very nearly impossible to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind.

We stand for freedom. That is our conviction for ourselves; that is our only commitment to others.

Women, who struggle and suffer pain to ensure the continuation of the human race, make much tougher and more courageous soldiers than all those big-mouthed freedom-fighting heroes put together!

Man is free at the instant he wants to be.