All government, in its essence, is a conspiracy against the superior man: its one permanent object is to oppress him and cripple him.
Democracy is a sort of laughing gas. It will not cure anything, perhaps, but it unquestionably stops the pain.
Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.
Every step in human progress, from the first feeble stirrings in the abyss of time, has been opposed by the great majority of men.
Every valuable thing that has been added to the store of man's possessions has been derided by them when it was new, and destroyed by them when they had power.
I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible to any public office of trust or profit in the Republic.
Laws are no longer made by a rational process of public discussion; they are made by a process of blackmail and intimidation, and they are executed in the same manner.
The final test of truth is ridicule. Very few dogmas have ever faced it and survived.
The most dangerous man, to any government, is the man who is able to think things out for himself, without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost invariably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane, and intolerable....
The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.
The strange American ardor for passing laws, the insane belief in regulation and punishment, plays into the hands of the reformers, most of them quacks themselves. Their efforts, even when honest, seldom accomplish any appreciable good.
There is always a well-known solution to every human problem--neat, plausible, and wrong.
Truth would quickly cease to be stranger than fiction, once we got used to it.