"I never write Metropolis for seven cents because I can get the same price for city. I never write policeman because I can get the same money for cop."

"The folly of mistaking a paradox for a discovery, a metaphor for a proof, a torrent of verbiage for a spring of capital truths, and oneself for an oracle, is inborn in us."

"I never could tell a lie that anybody would doubt, nor a truth that anybody would believe."

"A lie can travel halfway round the world while the truth is putting on its shoes."

"Scientists are the easiest to fool. They think in straight, predictable, directable, and therefore misdirectable, lines. The only world they know is the one where everything has a logical explanation and things are what they appear to be. Children and conjurors--they terrify me. Scientists are no problem; against them I feel quite confident."

"Science would be ruined if (like sports) it were to put competition above everything else, and if it were to clarify the rules of competition by withdrawing entirely into narrowly defined specialties. The rare scholars who are nomads-by-choice are essential to the intellectual welfare of the settled disciplines."

"Books must follow sciences, and not sciences books."

"The sciences do not try to explain, they hardly even try to interpret, they mainly make models. By a model is meant a mathematical construct which, with the addition of certain verbal interpretations, describes observed phenomena. The justification of such a mathematical construct is solely and precisely that it is expected to work."

"I almost think it is the ultimate destiny of science to exterminate the human race."

"Over the past ten years, for the first time, intelligence had become socially correct for girls."

"That young girl is one of the least benightedly unintelligent organic life forms it has been my profound lack of pleasure not to be able to avoid meeting."

"...a science is said to be useful if its development tends to accentuate the existing inequalities in the destribution of wealth, or more directly promotes the destruction of human life."

"...no man of genuinely superior intelligence has ever been an actor. Even supposing a young man of appreciable mental powers to be lured upon the stage, as philosophers are occasionally lured into bordellos, his mind would be inevitably and almost immediately destroyed by the gaudy nonsense issuing from his mouth every night."

"Dignity consists not in possessing honors, but in the consciousness that we deserve them."

"Let us overthrow the totems, break the taboos. Or better, let us consider them cancelled. Coldly, let us be intelligent."

"What a distressing contrast there is between the radiant intelligence of the child and the feeble mentality of the average adult."

"Men are equal; it is not birth but virtue that makes the difference."

"Be wiser than other people, if you can, but do not tell them so."