Utility is our national shibboleth: the savior of the American businessman is fact and his uterine half-brother, statistics.

I know sage, wormwood, and hyssop, but I can't smell character unless it stinks.

It is very perplexing how an intrepid frontier people, who fought a wilderness, floods, tornadoes, and the Rockies, cower before criticism, which is regarded as a malignant tumor in the imagination.

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

It takes a long time to understand nothing.

Everything ultimately fails, for we die, and that is either the penultimate failure or our most enigmatical achievement.

The majority of persons choose their wives with as little prudence as they eat. They see a troll with nothing else to recommend her but a pair of thighs and choice hunkers, and so smart to void their seed that they marry her at once. They imagine they can live in marvelous contentment with handsome feet and ambrosial buttocks. Most men are accredited fools shortly after they leave the womb.