Self-respect--the secure feeling that no one, as yet, is suspicious.

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

On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.

The demagogue is one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots.

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.

Morality is doing what is right, no matter what you are told. Religion is doing what you are told, no matter what is right.

Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.

Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.

The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule.

It is inaccurate to say that I hate everything. I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty, and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible for public office.

Democracy is also a form of worship. It is the worship of Jackals by Jackasses.

When a child is given to his parents, a crown is made for that child in Heaven, and woe to the parents who raise a child without consciousness of that eternal crown!

...as we rise from the organic and sink back ignominiously into the organic, it is a glory and a privilege to love what Death doesn't touch.

Fear the vulture, and the vulture will come. Fear nothing, and you are the vulture.

I have always had this view about the modern education system: we pay attention to brain development, but the development of warmheartedness we take for granted.

The covetous man never has money. The prodigal will have none shortly.

I'll be 50 years old tomorrow and that means, among other things, that now Bob Dole can start telling jokes about me.

If you have a friend, a good friend, a woman you love, and you learn she’s done something abominable, do you stop loving her?

Never let a fool kiss you, or a kiss fool you. Oh, what lies there are in kisses!

In the early years, you fight because you don't understand each other. In the later years, you fight because you do.

There was definitely a lack of any sort of villain in the Clinton era, which is why when Columbine happened, it was easy to pick on me. My face was around and it made good TV.