A painter can hang his pictures, but a writer can only hang himself.

No country has suffered so much from the ruins of war while being at peace as the American.

To write is a humiliation.

Though man is the only beast that can write, he has small reason to be proud of it. When he utters something that is wise it is nothing that the river horse does not know, and most of his creations are the result of accident.

The ancients understood the regulation of power better than the regulation of liberty.

Hardly a book of human worth, be it heaven's own secret, is honestly placed before the reader; it is either shunned, given a Periclean funeral oration in a hundred and fifty words, or interred in the potter's field of the newspapers back pages.

A man who can be entertaining for a full day will be in his grave by night-fall.