Politics is a place of humble hopes and strangely modest requirements, where all are good who are not criminal and all are wise who are not ridiculously otherwise.

Men will confess to treason, murder, arson, false teeth, or a wig. How many of them will own up to a lack of humor?

In middle life politics are not a mental acquisition; they are a temperament.

Talk ought always to run obliquely, not nose to nose with no chance of mental escape.

One learns little more about a man from the feats of his literary memory than from the feats of his alimentary canal.

Persecution was at least a sign of personal interest.

As crowds increase we build our forts of inattention, and the more we talk the easier it is to mean little and listen not at all.