“The central belief of every moron is that he is the victim of a mysterious conspiracy against his common rights and true deserts.”

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.

The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one’s time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.

The only thing wrong with Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address was that it was the South, not the North, that was fighting for a government of the people, by the people and for the people.

For every problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.

Becoming the best version of yourself requires you to continuously edit your beliefs, and to upgrade and expand your identity.

It’s hard to change your habits if you never change the underlying beliefs that led to your past behavior. You have a new goal and a new plan, but you haven’t changed who you are.

In my view, all that is necessary for faith is the belief that by doing our best we shall succeed in our aims: the improvement of mankind.

The challenges in our lives are there to STRENGTHEN our CONVICTIONS. They are NOT there to run us over.

I was never crippled until I lost hope.

Again, I see no reason why the belief that we are insignificant or fortuitous should lessen our faith.

I think I ended up being the scarlet woman partly because of my rather puritannical upbringing and beliefs. I always chose to think I was in love and that love was synonymous with marriage.

That said, your values will not always be the object of public admiration. In fact, the more you live by your beliefs, the more you will endure the censure of the world.