“The opera…is to music what a bawdy house is to a cathedral.”

“Say what you will about the Ten Commandments, you must always come back to the pleasant fact that there are only ten of them.”

“The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong. All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men who have whooped them up and tried to enforce them. The truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant, in this field as in all others. His culture is based on - I am not too sure.”

“Truth would quickly cease to be stranger than fiction, once we got as used to it.”

“If, after I depart this vale, you ever remember me and have thought to please my ghost, forgive some sinner and wink your eye at some homely girl.”

“When a new source of taxation is found it never means, in practice, that an old source is abandoned. It merely means that the politicians have two ways of milking the taxpayer where they had only one before.”

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