“Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage.”

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.

Sometimes the idiots outvote the sensible people.

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.

The only good bureaucrat is one with a pistol at his head. Put it in his hand and it’s good-bye to the Bill of Rights.

All government, in its essence, is a conspiracy against the superior man: its one permanent object is to oppress him and cripple him.

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

Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.

Once a woman passes a certain point in intelligence she finds it almost impossible to get a husband: she simply cannot go on listening without snickering.

The American people, North and South, went into the [Civil] war as citizens of their respective states, they came out as subjects … what they thus lost they have never got back.

No one in this world, so far as I know – and I have searched the records for years, and employed agents to help me – has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people.

Imagine the Creator as a low comedian, and at once the world becomes explicable.

The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out for himself.

There is no idea so stupid that you can’t find a professor who will believe it.

Free speech is too dangerous to a democracy to be permitted.

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

Man in his arrogance thinks himself a great work, worthy of the interposition of a deity. More humble, and I believe truer, to consider him created from animals.

Animals never worry about Heaven or Hell. Neither do I. Maybe that’s why we get along.

I really love animals and enjoy working with them.

Even if not a single fossil has ever been found, the evidence from surviving animals would still overwhelmingly force the conclusion that Darwin was right.

According to the latest figures, 75 percent of Earth’s land surface has been severely altered by humans. Deforestation and unsustainable agriculture as well as the illegal trade of endangered wildlife increase the risk of human-animal contact.

Man is the only creature that consumes without producing. He does not give milk, he does not lay eggs, he is too weak to pull the plough, he cannot run fast enough to catch rabbits. Yet he is lord of all the animals.

Besides love and sympathy, animals exhibit other qualities connected with the social instincts which in us would be called moral.

In the long history of humankind (and animal kind, too) those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed.