Bill Lovejoy Quotes

The basic fact about human existence is not that it is a tragedy, but that it is a bore. It is not so much a war as an endless standing in line.

No married man is genuinely happy if he has to drink worse whisky than he used to drink when he was single.

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

It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics or chemistry.

Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.

War will never cease until babies begin to come into the world with larger cerebrums and smaller adrenal glands.

Historian: an unsuccessful novelist.

The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.

We must respect the other fellow`s religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart.

Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.

Criticism is prejudice made plausible.

All men are frauds. The only difference between them is that some admit it. I myself deny it.

Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.

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.

The capacity of human beings to bore one another seems to be vastly greater than that of any other animal.

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

It is impossible to imagine Goethe or Beethoven being good at billiards or golf.

It is even harder for the average ape to believe that he has descended from man.

Men have a much better time of it than women. For one thing, they marry later; for another thing, they die earlier.

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.

Unquestionably, there is progress. The average American now pays out twice as much in taxes as he formerly got in wages.

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

I believe that all government is evil, and that trying to improve it is largely a waste of time.

Bachelors know more about women than married men; if they didn`t they`d be married too.

To die for an idea; it is unquestionably noble. But how much nobler it would be if men died for ideas that were true!

Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.

The difference between a moral man and a man of honor is that the latter regrets a discreditable act, even when it has worked and he has not been caught.

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.

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.

After all, all he did was string together a lot of old, well-known quotations.

Love is the delusion that one woman differs from another.

Legend: A lie that has attained the dignity of age.

For centuries, theologians have been explaining the unknowable in terms of the-not-worth-knowing.

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

The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.

The chief value of money lies in the fact that one lives in a world in which it is overestimated.

Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.

Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.

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

A celebrity is one who is known to many persons he is glad he doesn`t know.

The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one`s time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.

Misogynist: A man who hates women as much as women hate one another.

A man may be a fool and not know it, but not if he is married.

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.

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.

Strike an average between what a woman thinks of her husband a month before she marries him and what she thinks of him a year afterward, and you will have the truth about him.

In this world of sin and sorrow there is always something to be thankful for; as for me, I rejoice that I am not a Republican.

Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage.