Quotes: Profound and Cynical

Adults

When childhood dies, its corpses are called adults and they enter society, one of the politer names of hell. That is why we dread children, even if we love them. They show us the state of our decay.
Brian Aldiss

Old men are fond of giving advice to console themselves for their inability to set a bad example.
La Rochefoucauld

Age, n. That period of life in which we compound for the vices that we still cherish by reviling those that we have no longer the enterprise to commit.
Ambrose Bierce

God, Faith, and Religion

Religions which condemn the pleasures of sense, drive men to seek the pleasures of power. Throughout history power has been the vice of the ascetic.
Bertrand Russell

Heaven as conventionally conceived, is a place so inane, so dull, so useless, so miserable, that nobody has ever ventured to describe a whole day in heaven, though plenty of people have described a day at the seaside.
George Bernard Shaw

God is dead: but considering the state the species Man is in, there will perhaps be caves, for ages yet, in which his shadow will be shown.
Friedrich Nietzsche

The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatsoever that it is not utterly absurd. Indeed, in view of the silliness of the majority of mankind, a widespread belief is more likely to be foolish than sensible.
Bertrand Russell

Christian, n. One who believes that the New Testament is a divinely inspired book admirably suited to the spiritual need of his neighbour.
Ambrose Bierce

Which is it: is man one of God's blunders, or is it God one of man's blunders?
Friedrich Nietzsche

Christ died for our sins. Dare we make his martyrdom meaningless by not committing them?
Jules Feiffer

The truths of religion are never so well understood as by those who have lost the power of reasoning.
Voltaire

That which we call sin in others, is only experiment for us.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

If you talk to God, you are praying; if God talks to you, you have schizophrenia.
Thomas Szasz

A casual stroll through a lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything.
Friedrich Nietzsche

God will forgive me, it is his trade.
Heinrich Heine

Education, Learning and Knowledge

Education is what you acquire without any interference from your schooling.
Mark Twain

Education is the inculcation of the incomprehensible into the indifferent by the incompetent.
John Maynard Keynes

In large states public education will always be mediocre, for the same reason that in large kitchens the cooking is usually bad.
Friedrich Nietzsche

You can't expect a boy to be vicious until he's been to a good school.
Saki (Hector Hugh Munro)

There is no sin except stupidity.
Oscar Wilde

Logic, n. The art of thinking and reasoning in strict accordance with the limitations and incapacities of the human understanding.
Ambrose Bierce

Bigots, Censors, and Fanatics

Wherever they burn books, they will also, in the end, burn people.
Heinrich Heine

Bigot , n. One who is obstinately and firmly attached to an opinion that you do not entertain.
Ambrose Bierce

Obscenity is what happens to shock some elderly and ignorant magistrate.
Bertrand Russell

To forbid us anything is to make us have a mind for it.
Michel de Montaigne

It is gross ignorance that produces the dogmatic spirit. The man who knows next to nothing is always eager to teach what he has just learned.
Jean de la Bruyère

Nothing is so firmly believed as that which we least know.
Montaigne

Children

I love children. Especially when they cry ---for then someone takes them away.
Nancy Mitford

Children are never too tender to be whipped: like tough beefsteaks, the more you beat them the more tender they become.
Edgar Allan Poe

Law and Justice

The Law in its majestic equality forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and to steal bread.
Anatole France

Law is but a heathen word for power.
Daniel Defoe

Sir, executions are intended to draw spectators. If they do not draw spectators, they do not answer their purpose.
Samuel Johnson

A jury is composed of twelve men of average ignorance.
Herbert Spencer

Life and Death

Life is too important a thing to be taken seriously.
Oscar Wilde

Waldo is one of those people who would be enormously improved by death.
Saki

Vices and Virtues

Fidelity , n. A virtue peculiar to those who are about to be betrayed.
Ambrose Bierce

One should forgive one's enemies, but not before they are hanged.
Heinrich Heine

Egotist, n. A person more interested in himself than in me.
Ambrose Bierce

Conformity, humility, acceptance---with these coins we are to pay our fares to paradise.
Robert Lindner

The magic of our first love is our ignorance that it can ever end.
Benjamin Disraeli

The only true love is love at first sight; second sight dispels it.
Israel Zangwill

I am a gentleman. I live by robbing the poor.
George Bernard Shaw

Politeness is a tacit agreement that peoples' miserable defects, whether moral or intellectual, shall on either side be ignored and not be made the subject of reproach.
Arthur Schopenhauer

A man who moralises is usually a hyprocrite and a woman who moralises is invariably plain.
Oscar Wilde

I have to live for others and not for myself; that is middle-class morality.
George Bernard Shaw