George Jean Nathan Quotes

Bad officials are the ones elected by good citizens who do not vote.

Love demands infinitely less than friendship.

A man reserves his true and deepest love not for the species of woman in whose company he finds himself electrified and enkindled, but for that one in whose company he may feel tenderly drowsy.

It is also said of me that I now and then contradict myself. Yes, I improve wonderfully as time goes on.

All that is necessary to raise imbecility into what the mob regards as profundity is to lift it off the floor and put it on a platform.

No man can think clearly when his fists are clenched.

I drink to make other people interesting.

An optimist is a fellow who believes a housefly is looking for a way to get out.

Criticism is the art of appraising others at one's own value.

Politics is the diversion of trivial men who, when they succeed at it, become important in the eyes of more trivial men.

The path of sound credence is through the thick forest of skepticism.

Whenever a man encounters a woman in a mood he doesn't understand, he wants to know if she's tired.

Patriotism is often an arbitrary veneration of real estate above principles.

It is the mark of a superior person that, left to themselves they are able endlessly to amuse, interest and entertain themselves out of their personal stock of meditations, ideas, criticisms, memories, philosophy, humor and what not.

Love is an emotion experienced by the many and enjoyed by the few.

The notion that as a man grows older his illusions leave him is not quite true. What is true is that his early illusions are supplanted by new, and to him, equally convincing illusions.

Great art is as irrational as great music. It is mad with its own loveliness.

Love is the emotion that a woman feels always for a poodle dog and sometimes for a man.

In the theatre, a hero is one who believes that all women are ladies, a villain one who believes that all ladies are women.

A man admires a woman not for what she says, but what she listens to.

A ready way to lose your friend is to lend him money. Another equally ready way to lose him is to refuse to lend him money. It is six of one and a half dozen of the other.

Common sense, in so far as it exists, is all for the bourgeoisie. Nonsense is the privilege of the aristocracy. The worries of the world are for the common people.

Beauty makes idiots sad and wise men merry.

To speak of morals in art is to speak of legislature in sex. Art is the sex of the imagination.

An abstainer is the sort of man you wouldn't want to drink with even if he did.