I have no confidence in a man whose faults you cannot see.

The ruin of the human heart is self-interest, which the American merchant calls self-service. We have become a self-service populace, and all our specious comforts -the automatic elevator, the escalator, the cafeteria -are depriving us of volition and moral and physical energy.

We are a most solitary people, and we live, repelled by one another, in the gray, outcast cities of Cain.

Writing is conscience, scruple, and the farming of our ancestors.

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

Woman is the most superstitious animal beneath the moon. When a woman has a premonition that Tuesday will be a disaster, to which a man pays no heed, he will very likely lose his fortune then. This is not meant to be an occult or mystic remark. The female body is a vessel, and the universe drops its secrets into her far more quickly than it communicates them to the male.

Men are too unstable to be just; they are crabbed because they have not passed water at the usual time, or testy because they have not been stroked or praised.