User talk:PianoPlayerMark

A celebrity is one who is known to many persons he is glad he doesn't know.

A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin.

A home is not a mere transient shelter: its essence lies in the personalities of the people who live in it.

A judge is a law student who marks his own examination papers.

A poet more than thirty years old is simply an overgrown child.

All men are frauds. The only difference between them is that some admit it. I myself deny it. All successful newspapers are ceaselessly querulous and bellicose. They never defend anyone or anything if they can help it; if the job is forced on them, they tackle it by denouncing someone or something else. All [zoos] actually offer to the public in return for the taxes spent upon them is a form of idle and witless amusement, compared to which a visit to a penitentiary, or even to a State legislature in session, is informing, stimulating and ennobling. An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup. Any man who afflicts the human race with ideas must be prepared to see them misunderstood. Conscience is a mother-in-law whose visit never ends. Conscience is the inner voice that warns us somebody may be looking. Criticism is prejudice made plausible. Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard. For it is mutual trust, even more than mutual interest, that holds human associations together. Our friends seldom profit us but they make us feel safe... Marriage is a scheme to accomplish exactly that same end. It is even harder for the average ape to believe that he has descended from man. It is hard to believe that a man is telling the truth when you know that you would lie if you were in his place. 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. It is the dull man who is always sure, and the sure man who is always dull. Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence. Man is never honestly the fatalist, nor even the stoic. He fights his fate, often desperately. He is forever entering bold exceptions to the rulings of the bench of gods. This fighting, no doubt, makes for human progress, for it favors the strong and the brave. It also makes for beauty, for lesser men try to escape from a hopeless and intolerable world by creating a more lovely one of their own. Never let your inferiors do you a favor - it will be extremely costly. Philosophy consists very largely of one philosopher arguing that all others are jackasses. He usually proves it, and I should add that he also usually proves that he is one himself. Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy. Say what you will about the Ten Commandments, you must always come back to the pleasant fact that there are only ten of them. The chief value of money lies in the fact that one lives in a world in which it is overestimated. The government consists of a gang of men exactly like you and me. They have, taking one with another, no special talent for the business of government; they have only a talent for getting and holding office. The men the American public admires most extravagantly are the most daring liars; the men they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth. The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that ‘age brings wisdom’. Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule - and both commonly succeed, and are right. We are here and it is now. Further than that all human knowledge is moonshine. PianoPlayerMark (talk) 20:10, 11 June 2008 (UTC) Mark