“The chief contribution of Protestantism to human thought is its massive proof that God is a bore.”

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

“The true function of art is to criticize, embellish and edit nature… the artist is a sort of impassioned proof-reader, blue penciling the bad spelling of God.”

“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. The objection to it is not that it is predominantly painful, but that it is lacking in sense.”

“Believing passionately in the palpably not true... is the chief occupation of mankind.”

“Under democracy one party always devotes it's chief energies to prove that the other party is unfit to rule-- and both commonly succeed, and are right. the United States has never developed an aristocracy really disinterested or an intelligentsia really intelligent.It's history is simply a record of vacillations between two gangs of frauds.”

“Indeed it may be said with some confidence that the average man never really thinks from end to end of his life. There are moments when his cogitations are relatively more respectable than usual, but even at their climaxes they never reach anything properly describable as the level of serious thought. The mental activity of such people is only a mouthing of clichés. What they mistake for thought is simply a repetition of what they have heard. My guess is that well over eighty per cent. of the human race goes through life without having a single original thought. That is to say, they never think anything that has not been thought before and by thousands.”