Stupid people can’t laugh without being obnoxious, can’t eat without smacking their lips, can’t respond to a question without first repeating it back to you, can’t speak without shouting, can’t sleep without snoring, can’t read without subvocalizing, can’t think without saying “umm” and “ahh,” indeed can’t do anything without making unnecessary noise.
Simple ideas catch on, simple language is moving, simple machines last, simple organisms survive, simple people endure.
A piece of writing succeeds when the reader can get to the end of it before he regrets having started.
To know one thing deeply is, in some sense, to know all things.
The ability to write a coherent paragraph has a surprisingly high IQ requirement.
One of those rare guests who doesn’t overstay his welcome, one of those rare books that end before you’re done with it.
Some of our best ideas come from misunderstanding other people’s.
The middle-class dresses up, the upper-class dresses down.
Among men, the most common sexual fetish is romance. Among women, it’s rape.
Originality has a lot to do with how you combine unoriginal elements.
The physical world seems solid enough until you start looking too closely. Then it’s all waves of probability. It is the same with philosophy: from the outside, it seems as if it has definitive answers to important questions. But those of us on the inside see only question marks.
Hedonism is the strip-mining approach to pleasure.
What goes into great art? Four things: patience, patience, patience, talent.
An intellectual is anyone who pays attention to his own thoughts.
Humility entails self-respect; we too were made in the image of God.
Why has the West opened its borders to so many non-whites? Perhaps it has contracted something like AIDS. Its immune system has been compromised; it no longer has the ability to throw off invaders.
The body is socialist, a corpse is individualist. Indeed, nothing embraces the philosophy of individualism as thoroughly as a corpse undergoing decomposition.
Philosophy is pure because there’s no market for it. It is protected by its own uselessness.