The friendships of nations, built on common interests, cannot survive the mutability of those interests.

Our dogs will love and admire the meanest of us, and feed our colossal vanity with their uncritical homage.

Humor brings insight and tolerance.

Letters form a by-path of literature, a charming, but occasional, retreat for people of cultivated leisure.

A vast deal of ingenuity is wasted every year in evoking the undesirable, in the careful construction of objects which burden life. Frankenstein was a large rather than an isolated example.

The soul begins to travel when the child begins to think.

Democracy forever teases us with the contrast between its ideals and its realities, between its heroic possibilities and its sorry achievements.