Platitude: an idea (a) that is admitted to be true by everyone, and (b) that is not true. H. L.

Politics, as hopeful men practise it in the world, consists mainly of the delusion that a change in form is a change in substance.

Puritanism. The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.

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

Sin is a dangerous toy in the hands of the virtuous. It should be left to the congenitally sinful, who know when to play with it and when to let it alone.

Suicide: a belated acquiescence in the opinion of one’s wife’s relatives.

Sunday: A day given over by Americans to wishing they were dead and in heaven, and that their neighbors were dead and in hell. H. L.

Thanksgiving Day is a day devoted by persons with inflammatory rheumatism to thanking a loving Father that it is not hydrophobia. H. L.

The allurement that women hold out to men is precisely the allurement that Cape Hatteras holds out to sailors: they are enormously dangerous and hence enormously fascinating.

The American people, taking one with another, constitute the most timorous, sniveling, poltroonish, ignominious mob of serfs and goose-steppers ever