When I reach the shades at last it will no doubt astonish Satan to discover, on thumbing my dossier, that I was a member of the Y.M.C.A.

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

On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.

The demagogue is one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots.

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.

Morality is doing what is right, no matter what you are told. Religion is doing what you are told, no matter what is right.

Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.

Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.

The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule.

It is inaccurate to say that I hate everything. I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty, and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible for public office.

Democracy is also a form of worship. It is the worship of Jackals by Jackasses.

My lifesaver has always been the hazel iris of your soul. It never fails. When the world plunges me deep into the darkness, one look from you is all it takes to save me.

In any business, the more you learn, the more sympathetic you can be to other people's positions.

All his leisure clothes were absurd - jokes, really - as though leisure itself had to be ridiculed.

I wasn't one of those people who went to see a play and said, 'I want to be an actor.' I fell into it.

Come on, don't you ever stop and smell the coffee?

Kanye [West] just says the funniest analogies that are so random. I should start keeping a book - in 20 years, I'll have a big book of analogies.They always make me laugh.

I'm your mother. I see all. Hear all. Know all.

That is ever the difference between the wise and the unwise: the latter wonders at what is unusual; the wise man wonders at the usual.

Hip-hop, you can't really do that when you're in your 50s.

The dream is the liberation of the spirit from the pressure of external nature, a detachment of the soul from the fetters of matter.