Evil, which is our companion all our days, is not to be treated as a foe. It is wrong to cocker vice, but we grow narrow and pithless if we are furtive about it, for this is at best a pretense, and the sage knows good and evil are kindred. The worst of men harm others, and the best injure themselves.

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.

It takes a long time to understand nothing.

It is hideous and coarse to assume that we can do something for others-and it is vile not to endeavor to do it.

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

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.

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.