Aphorisms

Diplomacy: the patriotic art of lying for one’s country.

Year: a period of three hundred and sixty-five disappointments.

Telephone: an invention of the devil which abrogates some of the advantages of making a disagreeable person keep his distance.

Peace: in international affairs, a period of cheating between two periods of fighting.

Marriage: the state or condition of a community consisting of a master, a mistress and two slaves, making in all, two.

Love: a temporary insanity curable by marriage or by removal of the patient from the influences under which he incurred the disorder.

Contempt: the feeling of a prudent man for an enemy who is too formidable safely to be opposed.

Appeal: in law, to put the dice into the box for another throw.

Consult: to seek another’s disapproval of a course already decided on.

Conservative: a statesman who is enamored of existing evils.

Politician: an eel in the fundamental mud upon which the superstructure of organized society is reared.

Lawyer: one skilled in circumvention of the law.