Stupidity is an elemental force for which no earthquake is a match.
How is the world ruled and led to war? Diplomats lie to journalists and believe these lies when they see them in print.
Psychoanalysis is that mental illness for which it regards itself as therapy.
Journalists write because they have nothing to say, and have something to say because they write.
The trouble with Germans is not that they fire shells, but that they engrave them with quotations from Kant.
No ideas and the ability to express them - that's a journalist.
Solitude would be ideal if you could pick the people to avoid.
My unconscious knows more about the consciousness of the psychologist than his consciousness knows about my unconscious.
There is no more unfortunate creature under the sun than a fetishist who yearns for a woman's shoe and has to settle for the whole woman.
Culture is the tacit agreement to let the means of subsistence disappear behind the purpose of existence. Civilization is the subordination of the latter to the former.
If the reporter has killed our imagination with his truth, he threatens our life with his lies.
Democracy divides people into workers and loafers. It makes no provision for those who have no time to work.
Education is what most receive, many pass on, and few possess.
I and my public understand each other very well: it does not hear what I say, and I don't say what it wants to hear.
Someone who can write aphorisms should not fritter away his time in essays.
Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.
Corruption is worse than prostitution. The latter might endanger the morals of an individual, the former invariably endangers the morals of the entire country.
You'd be surprised how hard it can often be to translate an action into an idea.
Scandal begins when the police put a stop to it.
Sex education is legitimate in that girls cannot be taught soon enough how children don't come into the world.
Sexuality poorly repressed unsettles some families; well repressed, it unsettles the whole world.
Journalist: a person without any ideas but with an ability to express them; a writer whose skill is improved by a deadline: the more time he has, the worse he writes.
The extraordinary ability of a woman to forget is not the same as the talent of a lady not to be able to remember.
He who does without the praise of the crowd will not deny himself an opportunity to be his own adherent.
The sound principle of a topsy-turvy lifestyle in the framework of an upside-down world order has stood every test.
Squeeze human nature into the straitjacket of criminal justice and crime will appear.
Experiences are savings which a miser puts aside. Wisdom is an inheritance which a wastrel cannot exhaust.
Feminine passion is to masculine as an epic is to an epigram.
I and life: The case was settled chivalrously. The opponents parted without having made up.
Education is a crutch with which the foolish attack the wise to prove that they are not idiots.
To me all men are equal: there are jackasses everywhere, and I have the same contempt for them all.
Virginity is the ideal of those who want to deflower.
You would be surprised how hard it often is to translate an action into thought.
I had a terrible vision: I saw an encyclopedia walk up to a polymath and open him up.
Morality is a venereal disease. Its primary stage is called virtue; its secondary stage, boredom; its tertiary stage, syphilis.
Science is spectral analysis. Art is light synthesis.
I am already so popular that anyone who vilifies me becomes more popular than I am.
I don't like to meddle in my private affairs.
Sentimental irony is a dog that bays at the moon while pissing on graves.
It is better not to express what one means than to express what one does not mean.
The closer the look one takes at a word, the greater distance from which it looks back.
Jealousy is a dog's bark which attracts thieves.
There are people who can never forgive a beggar for their not having given him anything.
The mission of the press is to spread culture while destroying the attention span.
It is the style of idealism to console itself for the loss of something old with the ability to gape at something new.
Matrimony is the union of meanness and martyrdom.
Do not learn more than you absolutely need to get through life.
Curses on the law! Most of my fellow citizens are the sorry consequences of uncommitted abortions.
Justice is a whore that won't let herself be stiffed, and collects the wages of shame even from the poor.
