Diogenes stock of speech among Cynics

Money becomes the mother of all vices; luxury and an easy life, the dream of a sloth; poverty, a blessing; toils and vicissitudes, another blessing; wealth, theft, and great wealth, greater theft; a woman, grief; a man, still more grief; marriage, entrapment; family relations, still more entrapment; sexual satisfaction, the delight of pigs; a mouse, a paradigm of good life; a dog, something we should all strive to become; a beautiful face and an ugly face, precisely the same thing; a long life and a short life, again, the very same thing; a Greek, a Persian, and an Egyptian, once more, exactly the same unhappy thing; wine, the drink of fools; a man who takes pride for being a gourmet, a mindless fool; a human being, generally an aberration of nature; a politician, a rascal and a thief; an orator, a demented demagogue; a priest, a dispenser of lies; the belief in the gods, the consolation of dumb heads; speculative philosophy, especially that of Plato, a waste of time; education, another waste of time; news about people and places, useless gossip and still another waste of time; the stars in the sky and the beauty of the universe, an absurdity with which we should not be concerned; destiny and fate, excuses for poor behavior; a soldier, a trained killer, and a general, a trainer of killers; a policeman, a thief who is licensed to steal; a tax collector, a professional thief; a common thief, a person who reclaims what is his own; the State, the enemy of human freedom; one ' s country, the place where one happens to be at any given time; allegiance to a city or to a country, a manifestation of lunacy; democracy, a government in the hands of many fools; oligarchy, a government controlled by a few fools; monarchy, a government by one fool; a king, a tarantula; a prince who mingles with the poor, a liar; a man who commits a crime and denies it, a coward; a prostitute, someone who does what others do, but admits it; a friend, a rare occurrence in nature; an honest person, an almost impossible phenomenon; obedience to the laws, a form of idiocy; abidance by rules of etiquette and decorum, sheer stupidity; spectacles and diversions, a temporary cure for boredom and peepshows for unintelligent people; athletes who become famous and rich, the proof of human thoughtlessness.