No people require maxims so much as the American. The reason is obvious: the country is so vast, the people always going somewhere, from Oregon apple valley to boreal New England, that we do not know whether to be temperate orchards or sterile climate.

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

It takes a long time to understand nothing.

We are uneasy with an affectionate man, for we are positive he wants something of us, particularly our love.

Perhaps Samuel Johnson was a great man; he was certainly a drumbling one.

We are always talking about being together, and yet whatever we invent destroys the family, and makes us wild, touchless beasts feeding on technicolor prairies and rivers.

Intellectual sodomy, which comes from the refusal to be simple about plain matters, is as gross and abundant today as sexual perversion and they are nowise different from one another.