If a large city can, after intense intellectual efforts, choose for its mayor a man who merely will not steal from it, we consider it a triumph of the suffrage.

Literary people are forever judging the quality of the mind by the turn of expression.

That is the consolation of a little mind; you have the fun of changing it without impeding the progress of mankind.

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

Cast your cares on God; that anchor holds.

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.

By rights, satire is a lonely and introspective occupation, for nobody can describe a fool to the life without much patient self-inspection.