Perhaps Samuel Johnson was a great man; he was certainly a drumbling one.
It is hideous and coarse to assume that we can do something for others-and it is vile not to endeavor to do it.
Genius, like truth, has a shabby and neglected mien.
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.
I would rather take hellebore than spend a conversation with a good, little man.
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.