If knowledge can create problems, it is not through ignorance that we can solve them.

I loathe the expression "What makes him tick." It is the American mind, looking for simple and singular solution, that uses the foolish expression. A person not only ticks, he also chimes and strikes the hour, falls and breaks and has to be put together again, and sometimes stops like an electric clock in a thunderstorm.

No one has ever had an idea in a dress suit.

Thought is only a flash between two long nights, but this flash is everything.

Have the courage to be ignorant of a great number of things, in order to avoid the calamity of being ignorant of everything.

Politics is made up largely of irrelevancies.

There are only two kinds of scholars; those who love ideas and those who hate them.

Ask about your neighbors, then buy the house.

You cannot slander human nature; it is worse than words can paint it.

Machines take me by surprise with great frequency.