If a large city can, after intense intellectual efforts, choose for its mayor a man who merely will not steal from it, we consider it a triumph of the suffrage.

Persecution was at least a sign of personal interest. Tolerance is composed of nine parts of apathy to one of brotherly love.

Cast your cares on God; that anchor holds.

Clever people seem not to feel the natural pleasure of bewilderment, and are always answering questions when the chief relish of a life is to go on asking them.

I have found some of the best reasons I ever had for remaining at the bottom simply by looking at the men at the top.

Sin in this country has been always said to be rather calculating than impulsive.

By rights, satire is a lonely and introspective occupation, for nobody can describe a fool to the life without much patient self-inspection.

Every improvement in communication makes the bore more terrible.

I know of no more disagreeable sensation than to be left feeling generally angry without anybody in particular to be angry at.

One learns little more about a man from the feats of his literary memory than from the feats of his alimentary canal.

That is the consolation of a little mind; you have the fun of changing it without impeding the progress of mankind.

Art is a marriage of the conscious and the unconscious.

There are things in the universe that are simply and purely evil. A warrior does not seek to understand them, or compromise with them. He seeks only to obliterate them

I think up until the point when we started in the business, which was in the early '70s, most of the humor was political. The smart humor was political satire.

The Constitution never even mentions political parties, let alone the Republican and Democratic parties, yet all the election laws help to protect them from competition.

Scores of Congolese die each day unnecessarily due to the lack of access to healthcare and modern medicine.

I started singing at the Met when I was seven, and the competition was so fierce that it really prepared me.

Man indeed is the most noble, by creation, of all the creatures in the visible World; but by sin he has made himself the most ignoble.

To assert that we desire to bring about revolution in other countries, by interfering with their lives, is to speak of something which does not exist and which we never preach.

I agree with Dante, that the hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in a period of moral crisis maintain their neutrality. There comes a time when silence becomes betrayal.

Just as our taste in lovers is far more revealing than our choice of friends, the object of an artist's obsession can open up doors to their soul that might otherwise remain shut tight.