There are two kinds of men who never amount to much: those who cannot do what they are told and those who can do nothing else.

I want to know the truth, however perverted that may sound.

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

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

What is the difference between unethical and ethical advertising? Unethical advertising uses falsehoods to deceive the public; ethical advertising uses truth to deceive the public.

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.

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.

All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.

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

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.