"It is a waste of time to dissipate one's moral zeal in disapproving of royal persons who have mistresses."

"It must be admitted that both Richard III and Henry VII were thoroughly formidable, and that to be found standing in the way of either of them amounted to a fatal misfortune."

"I shall be an autocrat; that's my trade. And the good Lord will forgive me; that's his."

"All kings is mostly rapscallions."

"Must! Is must a word to be addressed to princes? Little man, little man! thy father, if he had been alive, durst not have used that word."

"Having more money does not ensure happiness. People with ten million dollars are no happier than people with nine million dollars."

"To say that you can love one person all your life is just like saying that one candle will continue burning as long as you live."

"It destroys one's nerves to be amiable every day to the same human being."

"My boyfriend and I broke up. He wanted to get married, and I didn't want him to."

"         you can
not make any hard and fast rule
concerning the morality of crawling into
soup nor anything else a certain
alloy of expediency improves the
gold of morality and makes
it wear all the longer"

"I would
fear greatly for the morals
of mehitabel the cat if she had any"

"she cannot see
why they are
investigating
her morals she says
wotthehell she says
i never claimed
i had any morals
she has always regarded
morals as an unnecessary
complication in life
her theory is
that they take up room that might
better be devoted to
something more interesting
live while you are alive
she says and postpone
morality to the hereafter
everything in its place
is my rule she says
but i am liberal she
says i do not give
a damn how moral other
people are i never try
to interfere with them
in fact i prefer them
moral they furnish
a background for my
vivacity"

"The superfluity of theoretical ethics is obvious in simple cases. Suppose, for instance, your child is ill. Love makes you wish to cure it, and science tells you how to do so. There is not an intermediate stage of ethical theory, where it is demonstrated that your child had better be cured. Your act springs directly from desire for an end, together with knowledge of means."

"Now honey, you're only going to be up there another month. Try not to get killed."

"New York City, as you know if you have ever met a New Yorker, is the greatest place in the world for everything: buildings, restaurants, stores, pizza, water, nightclubs that nobody can get into, hand gestures, rats, everything. New Yorkers are very proud of being from such a great city. If a New Yorker is forced to go to another place, he never misses an opportunity to tell anyone within the sound of his voice (a 14-mile radius) specifically how the new place is inferior to New York. If a New Yorker visits China, he will declare that the Chinese food in New York is much better. If he visits the Taj Mahal, he will feel compelled to point out that, heightwise, it is no World Trade Center. This is why New Yorkers are so popular wherever they go."

"Welcome to the archbishop of the capital of the world."

"I think I speak for everyone when I say that New York and everyone from there can fornicate themselves with a big iron stick."

"'I'm going to be an incontinent idiot,' my grandmother said; she looked directly at Owen Meany. 'Wouldn't you rather be murdered by a maniac?"

"Old age is terrible, for it comes not alone."

"We're eighty-six and I feel like it. I never thought my body would have to last this long. Too late now."

"I am not noticeably reticent about talking of things about which I know nothing."

"My opinions may have changed, but not the fact that I am right."

"I regard you with an indifference closely bordering on aversion."

"I do not want people to be agreeable, as it saves me the trouble of liking them."

"Love thy neighbour as thyself, but choose your neighbourhood."

"But it takes all kinds, he says, and surely God had some purpose when He sent the likes of ye to infest this earth."

"I thought of something my old coach at Staunton had often said: 'We win some, we lose some, and some get rained out; but we always suit up.'"

"We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air. We shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender."

"If you're going through hell, keep going.'"

"When reality becomes unbearable, the mind must withdraw from it and create a world of artificial perfection. Plato's world of pure Ideas and Forms, which alone is considered to be real, whereas the world of nature which we perceive is merely its cheap Woolworth copy, is a flight into delusion."

"Glumly he ... pottered off, thinking, as so many others had thought before him, that the ideal way of opening Parliament would be to put a bomb under it and press the button."

"Ninety-eight percent of the adults in this country are decent, hardworking, honest Americans. It's the other lousy two percent that get all the publicity. But then, we elected them."

"It is often just as important to be perceived as something as actually to be that something and, as a matter of fact, a candidate need not be anything ideologically at all."

"I'm going to assume that you're not a member of Congress, and that you therefore have a certain minimum amount of dignity."

"Only a lunatic would want to be president. These lunatics are created deliberately by those who wish to be presided over."

"It is fast approaching the point where I don't want to elect anyone stupid enough to want the job."

"When I was a boy I was told that anybody could become President; I'm beginning to believe it."

"Tsalagi prayers do not ask for anything but give thanks for what is. We live, we breathe. The challenges of illness, separation from loved ones, frustration in one's work, these are opportunities to burn away patterns of mind obscuring the beauty of widsom's fire. So the rising sun is reason enough for thankfulness, in that another day has come."

"'At my house,' Krazy said, 'it's always Happy Hour!' She smiled, and pointed to her bungalow. 'A Bar is Born.!'"

   "'I was assaulted by the duck pond.'
   "The suspicion that the speaker had been drinking grew in Sir Aylmer's mind. Even Reginald Twistleton at the height of one of his midnight orgies might have hesitated, he felt, to make a statement like that.
   "'By the duck pond?' he echoed, his eyes widening.
   "'Yes, sir.'
   "'How the devil can you be assaulted by a duck pond?'
   "Constable Potter saw where the misunderstanding had arisen. The English language is full of these pitfalls.
   "'When I said, "by the duck pond," I didn't mean "by the duck pond," I meant "by the duck pond." That is to say,' proceeded Constable Potter, speaking just in time, '"near" or "adjacent to," in fact "on the edge of." I was the victim of an aggravated assault on the edge of the duck pond, sir. Somebody pushed me in.'"

"I made some studies, and reality is the leading cause of stress amongst those in touch with it. I can take it in small doses, but as lifestyle I found it too confining."

"You see, love is something that you can leave behind you when you die. It's that powerful. The nagi, the soul, it will roam and travel. If two people loved each other very much they come back as twins. They had a great love, they're whirling around out there, and the Great Spirit has pity and lets them come right back in again -- twins, triplets, not only lovers but a brother and sister too who were especially fond of each other could come back like this. One reborn this way would carry a memory going way back. I used to know one, a man named Somebody, who remembered part of his his former life going back over 200 years ago."

"         too
many deaths and transmigrations look
vulgar and ostentatious"

"Piety makes people incredibly stupid."

"Religion will not regain its old power until it can face change in the same spirit as does science. Its principles may be eternal, but the expression of those principles requires continual development."

"She didn't like him being an atheist, and he wouldn't stop being an atheist, and finally he said something about Jonah and the Whale which it was impossible for her to overlook."

"judging by the number and variety
of pills and religions in the world
the chief occupation of man
has been the state of his digestion
and the condition of his soul
and just look at both of them"

"I hold that any religion that satisfies the individual urge is valid for that person."

"Fear is the parent of cruelty, therefore it is no wonder if cruelty and religion have gone hand in hand. It is because fear is at the basis of those two things."

"The new religion without any secrets is philosophy. The old religion, said Aristotle, is necessary only for the uneducated; Confucius, Buddha, Voltaire and Lessing were of the same opinion."

"Conventionality is not morality. Self-righteousness is not religion."

"There seems to be some curious connection between piety and poor rhymes."

"He [Aristotle] pointed out that people who had become initiates in the various mystery religions were not required to learn any facts 'but to experience certain emotions and to be put in a certain disposition.' Hence his famous literary theory that tragedy effected a purification (katharsis) of the emotions of terror and pity that amounted to an experience of rebirth."

"Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction."

"Salvation was universally considered to be much more becoming in women than in men."

"However far-fetched it may sound, experience shows that many neuroses are caused by the fact that people blind themselves to their own religious promptings because of a childish passion for rational enlightenment."

"I think we don't have ideology. We don't have theology. We dance."

"I took the I-95 down to Pensacola
All I found was a bunch of holy rollers
They don't know nothing 'bout saving me"

"Of course Fintan knows who stood at the foot of the cross. Why wouldn't he? He's always running off to Mass with his mother, who is known for her holiness. She's so holy her husband ran off to Canada to cut down trees, glad to be gone and never heard from again."

"There has been a rumor in recent years to the effect that I have become less opposed to religious orthodoxy than I formerly was. This rumor is totally without foundation. I think all the great religions of the world -- Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity, Islam, and Communism -- both untrue and harmful."

"Religion is all bunk."

"I am aware that many divines are far more marvelous than I am, and that I cannot wholly appreciate merits so far transcending my own. Nevertheless, even after making allowances under this head, I cannot but think that Omnipotence operating through all eternity might have produced something better."

"The minister has two daughters, both girls, an a wife. One of the girls is good lookin. The other is more like youd expeck."

"Clergymen almost necessarily fail in two ways as teachers of morals. They condemn acts which do no harm and they condone acts which do great harm."

"At a moment when the supply of milk to nursing mothers is being cut down to save expense, public authorities will spend vast sums on paving rich residential districts where there is little traffic. They must know that in taking this decision they are condemning a certain number of working-class children to death for the crime of poverty. Yet the ruling party is supported by the immense majority of ministers of religion, who, with the Pope at their head, have pledged the vast forces of superstition throughout the world to the support of social injustice."

"'If you vote Republican, does that make you an accomplice to their crimes?"

"The Republicans have a high Beady-Eyed Self-Righteous Scary Borderline Loon Quotient, as evidenced by Phyllis Schlafly, Pat Robertson, the entire state of Utah, etc."