“It should not prejudice my voice that I’m not born a man, if I say something advantageous to the present situation. For I’m taxed too, and as a toll provide men for the nation.”

Today things are better than yesterday.

Ye Children of Man! whose life is a span, Protracted with sorrow from day to day, Naked and featherless, feeble and querulous, Sickly, calamitous creatures of clay!

Wealth–the most excellent of all gods.

Women, you overheated dipsomaniacs, never passing up a chance to wangle a drink, a great boon to bartenders but a bane to us–not to mention our crockery and our woolens!

When men drink, then they are rich and successful and win lawsuits and are happy and help their friends. Quickly, bring me a beaker of wine, so that I may wet my mind and say something clever.

You cannot make a crab walk straight.

To win the people, always cook them some savoury that pleases them.

When men drink wine they are rich, they are busy, they push lawsuits, they are happy, they are friends.

Ah! the Generals! they are numerous, but not good for much!

A fox is subtlety itself.

There is no honest man! not one, that can resist the attraction of gold!

A man’s homeland is wherever he prospers.

Have you ever, looking up, seen a cloud like to a Centaur, a Part, or a Wolf, or a Bull?

It is bad taste for a poet to be coarse and hairy.

You vote yourselves salaries out of the public funds and care only for your own personal interests; hence the state limps along.

These impossible women! How they do get around us! The poet was right: can’t live with them, or without them!

I was born to a dad who was born in the South Bronx while the Bronx was burning, while landlords were committing arson to their own buildings.

I know what it’s like to access the privilege of a ZIP Code but also be born in one that could have destined me to something else.

I think leaving [death] can be as joyous as – probably more joyous than – being born, because being born is very physically uncomfortable for the baby.

A love thought: I love you so much that I could wish I had been born your brother, or had brought you into the world myself.

I’m a born librarian with a sex drive.

Jesus Christ—who, as it turns out, was born of a virgin, cheated death, and rose bodily into the heavens—can now be eaten in the form of a cracker

God does not patch up the old life, or make certain repairs on the old life; He gives a new life, through the new birth.

Before we were born, a whole society of storytellers was already here. The storytellers who were here before us taught us how to be human.