The pioneers and missionaries of religion have been the real cause of more trouble and war than all other classes of mankind.

I have made no money. I am as poor now as ever I was in my life - except in hope, which is by no means bankable.

A fool, for example, thinks Shakespeare a great poet . . . yet the fool has never read Shakespeare.

The death of a beautiful woman, is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world.

Were the succession of stars endless, then the background of the sky would present us an uniform luminosity, like that displayed by the Galaxy-since there could be absolutely no point, in all that background, at which would not exist a star. The only mode, therefore, in which, under such a state of affairs, we could comprehend the voids which our telescopes find in innumerable directions, would be by supposing the distance of the invisible background so immense that no ray from it has yet been able to reach us at all.

The people have nothing to do with the laws but to obey them.

And now was acknowledged the presence of the Red Death. He had come like a thief in the night. And one by one dropped the revelers in the blood-bedewed halls of their revel, and died each in the despairing posture of his fall. And the life of the ebony clock went out with that of the last of the gay. And the flames of the tripods expired. And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.