What is wrong is not the great discoveries of science—information is always better than ignorance, no matter what information or what ignorance. What is wrong is the belief behind the information, the belief that information will change the world. It won’t.

You burned the city of London in our houses and we felt the flames.

Piety's hard enough to take among the poor who have to practice it. A rich man's piety stinks. It's insufferable.

Around, around the sun we go: The moon goes round the earth. We do not die of death: We die of vertigo.

The American mood, perhaps even the American character, has changed. There are few manifestations any longer of the old American self-assurance which so irritated Dickens. Instead, there is a sense of frustration so perceptible that even our politicians have attempted to exploit it.

We are as great as our belief in human liberty - no greater. And our belief in human liberty is only ours when it is larger than ourselves.

A self-advertising writer is always a self-extinguished writer.