Women can accept the fact that a man is a rotter, a swindler, a drug taker, a confirmed liar, and a general swine, without batting an eyelash, and without its impairing their affection for the brute in the least. Women are wonderful realists.
I cannot accept any concept of God based on the fear of life or the fear of death, or blind faith. I cannot prove to you that there is no personal God, but if I were to speak of him I would be a liar.
I don't doubt that every prince would like to be both; but since it is hard to accomodate these qualities, if you have to make a choice, to be feared is much safer than to be loved. For it is a good general rule about men, that they are ungrateful, fickle, liars, and deceivers, fearful of danger and greedy for gain....[love] is a link of obligation which men, because they are rotten, will break anything they think doing so serves their advantage; but fear involves dread of punishment, from which they can never escape.
It really gets me when the critics say I haven't done enough for the economy. I mean, look what I've done for the book publishing industry. You've heard some of the titles. 'Big Lies,' 'The Lies of George W. Bush,' 'The Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them.' I'd like to tell you I've read each of these books, but that'd be a lie.
I would be a liar, a hypocrite, or a fool - and I'm not any of those - to say that I don't write for the reader. I do. But for the reader who hears, who really will work at it, going behind what I seem to say. So I write for myself and that reader who will pay the dues.
Some years ago John Kenneth Galbraith wrote in an essay on his efforts at writing a history of economics: 'As one approaches the present, one is filled with a sense of hopelessness; in a year and possibly even a month, there is now more economic comment in the supposedly serious literature than survives from the whole of the thousand years commonly denominated as the Middle Ages ... anyone who claims to be familiar with it all is a confessing liar.' I believe that all physicists would subscribe to the same sentiments regarding their own professional literature. I do at any rate.
It really gets me when the critics say I haven't done enough for the economy. I mean, look what I've done for the book publishing industry. You've heard some of the titles. 'Big Lies,' 'The Lies of George W. Bush,' 'The Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them.' I'd like to tell you I've read each of these books, but that'd be a lie.
Just as the liar 's punishment is, not in the least that he is not believed , but that he cannot believe any one else; so a guilty society can more easily be persuaded that any apparently innocent act is guilty than that any apparently guilty act is innocent.