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We must be willing to pay a price for freedom.
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It is impossible to imagine Goethe or Beethoven being good at billiards or golf.
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[Government's] great contribution to human wisdom...is the discovery that the taxpayer has more than one pocket.
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What fetched me instantly (and thousands of other newcomers with me) was the subtle but unmistakable sense of escape from the United States.
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Time is the great legalizer, even in the field of morals.
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As long as the Southern colleges have revivals on their campuses and students get converted to Methodism and join the YMCA and are accepted as gentlemen, it will be impossible to think of the South as civilized...The educated folk of the Old South took theology lightly, and religion to them was hardly more than a charming ritual, useful on solemn occassions.
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New York is the place where all the aspirations of the western world meet to form one vast master aspiration, as powerful as the suction of a steam dredge. It is the icing on the pie called Christian civilization.
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Wealth - any income that is at least one hundred dollars more a year than the income of one's wife's sister's husband.
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A woman usually respects her father, but her view of her husband is mingled with contempt, for she is of course privy to the transparent devices by which she snared him.
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The central belief of every moron is that he is the victim of a mysterious conspiracy against his common rights and true deserts.
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A man may be a fool and not know it, but not if he is married.
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Philadelphia is the most pecksniffian of American cities, and thus probably leads the world.
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Jury - A group of twelve men who, having lied to the judge about their hearing, health and business engagements, have failed to fool him.
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Truth would quickly cease to be stranger than fiction, once we got used to it.
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No matter how happily a woman may be married, it always pleases her to discover that there is a nice man who wishes that she were not.
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Nothing is so abject and pathetic as a politician who has lost his job, save only a retired stud-horse.
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The great artists of the world are never Puritans, and seldom even ordinarily respectable. No virtuous man - that is, virtuous in the Y.M.C.A. sense - has ever painted a picture worth looking at, or written a symphony worth hearing, or a book worth reading.
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Christian - One who is willing to serve three Gods, but draws the line at one wife.
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One of the things that makes a Negro unpleasant to white folk is the fact that he suffers from their injustice. He is thus a standing rebuke to them.
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The Gettysburg Adress has been included, of late, in several anthologies of poetry. It actually meets the major requirement of all poetry: It is a mellifluous and emotional statement of the obviously not true. The men who fought for self-determination at Gettysburg were not the Federals but the Confederates.
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The only liberty an inferior man really cherishes is the liberty to quit work, stretch out in the sun, and scratch himself.
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It is not materialism that is the chief curse of the world, as pastors teach, but idealism. Men get into trouble by taking their visions and hallucinations too seriously.
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It is not a sign of communal well-being when men turn to their government to execute all their business for them, but rather a sign of decay, as in the United States today. The state, indeed, is but one of the devices that a really healthy community sets up to manage its affairs.
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Bridges would not be safer if only people who knew the proper definition of a real number were allowed to design them.