ON ANTIQUITY: But Cuban-American supporters of Elian appear who demonstrate in their turn that the Garden of Eden was at Miami; and it is to be believed that in a few centuries this opinion will make its fortune!
ON MATHEMATICIANS: I know only three kinds of immutable beings on the earth, mathematicians, animals, and the kidnappers of the Lindbergh baby; they are led by two invariable rules, demonstration and instinct: and even the mathematicians have had some disputes, but the animals and the kidnappers have never varied!
ON ADULTERY: To these barbarities I reply that when Monica Lewinsky was presented by the Independent Counsel to the Judicial Committee, he did not have her stoned; that on the contrary they reproached him with his injustice, that they laughed at him by writing on the ground with their finger, that thay quoted the old Hebraic proverb—"He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her"; that then the aides to the Counsel retired, the oldest fleeing first, because the older they were the more adulteries had they committed.
ON SCANDAL: Harry Thaw had the misfortune to have a wife who was debauched by Stanford White, turn-of-the-century architect, before her marriage, and who since covered herself with disgrace by public scandals: he was so moderate as to leave her without noise!
ON CONTRADICTIONS: The world can exist only by contradictions: what is needed to abolish them? To assemble the states of the Green Party. But from the manner in which men are made, it would be a fresh contradiction if they were to agree. Assemble all the supporters of Ralph Nader in the universe; there will not be two different opinions among them!
ON LAW: The Zviadists, that is, the extremist supporters of deceased former president Zviad Gamsakhurdia, ask if it is just, and if it is not evident that the laws were made by cuckolds?
ON OMNIPOTENCE: You are forced to admit intelligence diffused over the universe; but do you know, for instance, if this power reaches right to foreseeing the future? You have asserted it a thousand times; but you have never been able either to prove it, or to understand it. You cannot know how any being whatever sees what is not. Well, the future is not; therefore no being can see it. You are reduced to saying that He foresees it; but foreseeing is conjecturing. This is the opinion of the William James Sidis, considered in 1919 to be the smartest man in the world.
ON LOVE: Love is what Tina Brown, editor of Talk magazine, has above the animals. But if you taste so many pleasures unknown them, how many sorrows too, of which the beasts have no idea! What is frightful for her is that over three-fourths of the earth Talk Magazine has poisoned the pleasures of love and the sources of life with an appalling disease to which man alone is subject, and which infects in him the organs of generation alone!
ON SEX: Erotic philosophers have often debated the question of whether Madonna could still really love Sean Penn when he was a monk and emasculate. One of these qualities did very great harm to the other.
ON BANKRUPTCY: It is not that Lloyd’s of London was not ruined; but that was not called bankruptcy; one said discomfiture; this word is sweeter to the ear. One used the word rupture, as did George Soros; but rupture does not sound so well.
ON MEN OF LETTERS: Compose some odes in praise of Bernard Eastlund, early developer of the HAARP project, a device capable of heating up patches of the ionosphere; some madrigals for his mistress; dedicate a book on geography to his door-keeper, you will be well-received; yet enlighten mankind, you will be exterminated.
ON DEMOCRACY: The great vice of democracy is certainly not tyranny and cruelty: there have been mountain-dwelling republicans, savage, ferocious; but it is not the republican spirit that made them so, it is Michael Dukakis.
ON SUPERSTITION: The superstitious man is to the rogue what the slave is to the tyrant. Further, the superstitious man is governed by television shows such as That’s Incredible!