The middle class is so funny, it’s the class I know best, and it’s the class where you find the most pretension, so that’s what makes the middle classes so funny.

Wit is the lowest form of humor.

I was the first woman to burn my bra – it took the fire department four days to put it out.

It is necessary for him who lays out a state and arranges laws for it to presuppose that all men are evil and that they are always going to act according to the wickedness of their spirits whenever they have free scope.

Let’s not burn the universities yet. After all, the damage they do might be worse.

I laugh all the time – at things, people, stuff, whatever. But, I don’t laugh onstage because then it’s serious business.

I’ve exercised with women so thin that buzzards followed them to their cars.

There is so much that must be done in a civilized barbarism like war.

Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves are its only safe depositories.

No one has done a study on this, as far as I can tell, but I think Facebook might be the first place where a large number of people have come out. We didn’t create that – society was generally ready for that. I think this is just part of the general trend that we talked about, about society being more open, and I think that’s good.

Why should we take advice on sex from the pope? If he knows anything about it, he shouldn’t!

You have a ready wit. Tell me when it’s ready.

The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class.

The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, but the earth is still going round the sun.

No one can say, ‚I have dropped out – I am no longer in the system.‘ When you’re in prison, you’re even closer to the system: you feel it more, and you might be in there for whatever reason. You don’t transform the system as an absolute thing.

The lessons of history would suggest that civilisations move in cycles. You can track that back quite far – the Babylonians, the Sumerians, followed by the Egyptians, the Romans, China. We’re obviously in a very upward cycle right now, and hopefully that remains the case. But it may not.

If the law is upheld only by government officials, then all law is at an end.

I have thought a sufficient measure of civilization is the influence of good women.

But while they prate of economic laws, men and women are starving. We must lay hold of the fact that economic laws are not made by nature. They are made by human beings.

Modern education has devoted itself to the teaching of impudence, and then we complain that we can no longer control our mobs.

Joe Frazier is so ugly that when he cries, the tears turn around and go down the back of his head.

Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.

In my house I’m the boss, my wife is just the decision maker.

The only advantage of not being too good a housekeeper is that your guests are so pleased to feel how very much better they are.

The masculine spirit is under assault. It’s obvious.

The only reason I would take up jogging is so that I could hear heavy breathing again.

The foundation of every state is the education of its youth.

The right honourable gentleman caught the Whigs bathing, and walked away with their clothes. He has left them in the full enjoyment of their liberal positions, and he is himself a strict conservative of their garments.

It is a vain hope to make people happy by politics.

Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions.

I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member.

In Japan, the writers have made up a literary community, a circle, a society. I think 90 percent of Japan’s writers live in Tokyo. Naturally, they make a community. There are groups and customs, and so they are tied up in a way.

It doesn’t make a difference what temperature a room is, it’s always room temperature.

This City is what it is because our citizens are what they are.

I can’t imagine what it is like to be raised in a society where their only statues that exist are to you and your father.

Teach a parrot the terms ‚supply and demand‘ and you’ve got an economist.

I’ve just had eighteen straight whiskies. I think that’s the record.

I’m screamingly funny, you know, I really am in the books. And that helps because I’m funnier than a lot of people, I think, and that’s appreciated by young people.

Where there is no opposition to evil, it multiplies.

Most of the time I don’t have much fun. The rest of the time I don’t have any fun at all.

Humor has justly been regarded as the finest perfection of poetic genius.

I’ve had a perfectly wonderful evening. But this wasn’t it.

Only kings, presidents, editors, and people with tapeworms have the right to use the editorial ‚we.‘

I am concerned about the whole man. I am concerned about what the people, using their government as an instrument and a tool, can do toward building the whole man, which will mean a better society and a better world.

There is only one step from the sublime to the ridiculous.

Everybody’s journey is individual. If you fall in love with a boy, you fall in love with a boy. The fact that many Americans consider it a disease says more about them than it does about homosexuality.

The French are so into themselves that they don’t even notice you.

We live in ugly times.

In December, I agreed to extend the tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans because it was the only way I could prevent a tax hike on middle-class Americans. But we cannot afford $1 trillion worth of tax cuts for every millionaire and billionaire in our society. We can’t afford it. And I refuse to renew them again.

I think when people mean that Discworld books have become darker they really mean the series is growing up. In ‚The Colour of Magic‘ most of the city is set alight. It’s a joke, in much the same way that the Earth is destroyed almost at the start of Douglas Adams’s ‚The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.‘

Never accept a drink from a urologist.

There can be no keener revelation of a society’s soul than the way in which it treats its children.

God made the Idiot for practice, and then He made the School Board.

If men were angels, no government would be necessary.

I don’t get up, get dressed, go out, and think, ‚Okay, I gotta find eight jokes.‘

Don’t sweat the petty things and don’t pet the sweaty things.

The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.

Laws made by common consent must not be trampled on by individuals.

People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.

No good is ever done to society by the pictorial representation of its diseases.

I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments by those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations.