“The trouble with Communism is the Communists, just as the trouble with Christianity is the Christians.”

“Perhaps the most revolting character that the United States ever produced was the Christian Businessman.”

“Giving every man a vote has no more made men wise and free than Christianity has made them good.”

“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.”

“Socialism, Puritanism, Philistinism, Christianity—he saw them all as allotropic forms of democracy, as variations upon the endless struggle of quantity against quality, of the weak and timorous against the strong and enterprising, of the botched against the fit.”

“All that the YMCA's horse and rings really accomplished was to fill me with an ineradicable distaste, not only for Christian endeavor in all its forms, but also for every variety of calisthenics, so that I still begrudge the trifling exertion needs to climb in and out of the bathtub, and hate all sports as rabidly as a person who likes sports hates common sense.”

“The older I get the more I admire and crave competence, just simple competence, in any field from adultery to zoology.”