Don't wait for the right opportunity: create it.

I can forgive Alfred Nobel for having invented dynamite, but only a fiend in human form could have invented the Nobel Prize.

For the pre-Darwinian age had come to be regarded as a Dark Age in which men still believed that the book of Genesis was a standard scientific treatise, and that the only additions to it were Galileo'a demonstration of Leonardo da Vinci's simple remark that the earth is a moon of the sun, Sir Humphrey Davy's invention of the safety lamp, the discovery of electricity, the application of steam to industrial purposes, and the penny post.

Freedom, my good girl, means being able to count on how other people will behave.

Virtue is insufficient temptation.

People become attached to their burdens sometimes more than the burdens are attached to them.

The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and about all time.