Nothing in our times has become so unattractive as virtue.
Utility is our national shibboleth: the savior of the American businessman is fact and his uterine half-brother, statistics.
I know sage, wormwood, and hyssop, but I can't smell character unless it stinks.
Of all the animals on earth, none is so brutish as man when he seeks the delirium of coition.
A man who can be entertaining for a full day will be in his grave by night-fall.
Herman Melville was as separated from a civilized literature as the lost Atlantis was said to have been from the great peoples of the earth.