Ben Jonson Quotes

Now listen. You can't fool all the people all the time-- but I want you to try.

Taking things not as they ought to be, but as they are, I fear it must be allowed that Macchiavelli will always have more disciples than Jesus.

There are two things which ought to teach us to think but meanly of human glory; the very best have had their calumniators, the very worst their panegyrists.

A man who first tried to guess 'what the public wants,' and then preached that as Christianity because the public wants it, would be a pretty mixture of fool and knave

The men the American people admire most extravagantly are the most daring liars; the men they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth.

Reputations are maintained by the outside world, and they're created by it, too, by and large. And they serve as a hell of a device for privacy, because the more people look for something that's not there, the less chance they have of violating who you are. It's like going out there with a mask on, without having to exercise your upper body to put it on.

But lies were what people wanted; that was politics.

And for a price, I will pretend absolutely nothing.

The press is like a woman: sublime when it lies, it will not let go until it has forced you to believe it. The public, like a foolish husband, always succumbs.

Do you know why I won the last elections? It was because the people liked me, yes, because I had worked, yes, but also because the opposition had behaved badly toward me. And do you know why I won this war? Because my army was able to do it, yes, but also because the Americans were on the side of Pakistan.

I think a lot of people, not all of them, but a bunch of TV people put Donald Trump on television thinking he's making a fool of himself and thinking that he's making a fool of the GOP. I think early on that's what the Republican establishment thought. "Oh, let's hear more of this guy. He's just helping us left and right. He's digging his own grave here."

We have all heard the story of the man who preached so well and lived so badly, that when he was in the pulpit everybody said he ought never to come out again, and when he was out of it they all declared he never ought to enter it again.

Conventionality is the tacit agreement to set appearances before reality, form before content.

Whoever is a hypocrite in his religion mocks God, presenting to Him the outside and reserving the inward for his enemy.

I think that's what's - one of the things that is alarming to me is [Donald] Trump, and I think Trump supporters seem to believe, he won, huge upset, full credit to him, and has got the wind at his back. And Republicans on The Hill do want him to succeed, obviously, and they're deferring to him more than they deep down in private sort of wish - want to, but they are going to defer to him publicly for awhile. But I think that is going to run out faster than people think.

A small lie needs a bodyguard of bigger lies to protect it.

The French probably invented the very notion of discretion. It's not that they feel that what you don't know won't hurt you; they feel that what you don't know won't hurt them. To the French lying is simply talking.

The Philosophy of Princes is to dive into the Secrets of men, leaving the secrets of nature to those that have spare time.

Anyone who is friends with Bill Clinton shouldn't be telling their wife about it.

Ultimately, at the end of the day, you couldn't say you were better than the other person because you knew you had a secret. You knew you had cheated.

I hear it said of somebody that he is leading a double life. I think to myself: Just two?

A traveling show visited a country town and one of the acts was advertised as a striptease. A small boy begged his mother for a quarter to buy a ticket, but the mother refused, telling her son that if he went to that show he would see something awful. Well, the boy sneaked in the show and the first thing he saw was something awful - his own dad sitting on the front row.

In public affairs men are often better pleased that the truth, though known to everybody, should be wrapped up under a decent cover than if it were exposed in open daylight to the eyes of all the world.

...people with nothing to declare carry the most.

Socialist ideology, like so many others, has two main dangers. One stems from confused and incomplete readings of foreign texts, and the other from the arrogance and hidden rage of those who, in order to climb up in the world, pretend to be frantic defenders of the helpless so as to have shoulders on which to stand.