The individual cannot think and communicate his thought, the governor and legislator cannot act effectively or frame his laws without words, and the solidity and validity of these words is in the care of the damned and despised litterati...when their very medium, the very essence of their work, the application of word to thing goes rotten, i.e. becomes slushy and inexact, or excessive or bloated, the whole machinery of social and of individual thought and order goes to pot.

I have never known anyone worth a damn who wasn't irascible.

It would be about as easy for an American to become a Chinaman or a Hindoo as for him to acquire an Englishness or a Frenchness or a European-ness that is more than half skin deep.

small talk comes from small bones

The curse of me and my nation is that we always think things can be bettered by immediate action of some sort, any sort rather than no sort.

Humanity is the rich effluvium, it is the waste and the manure and the soil, and from it grows the tree of the arts.

The history of an art is the history of masterwork, not of failures, or mediocrity.