The bad poet is a toady mimicking nature.

We are ruled by chance but never have enough patience to accept its despotism.

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

The newspaper has debauched the American until he is a slavish, simpering, and angerless citizen; it has taught him to be a lump mass-man toward fraud, simony, murder, and lunacies more vile than those of Commodus or Caracalla.

Genius, like truth, has a shabby and neglected mien.

Men are mad most of their lives; few live sane, fewer die so. The acts of people are baffling unless we realize that their wits are disordered. Man is driven to justice by his lunacy.

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