You may well ask me why...I took the time to write [books]. I can only reply that I do not know. There was no why about it. I had to: that was all.

With the single exception of Homer, there is no eminent writer, not even Sir Walter Scott, whom I can despise so entirely as I despise Shakespeare when I measure my mind against his. . . . It would positively be a relief to me to dig him up and throw stones at him.

You use a glass mirror to see your face; you use works of art to see your soul.

Hollywood keeps before its child audiences a string of glorified young heroes, everyone of whom is an unhesitating and violent Anarchist. His one answer to everything that annoys him or disparages his country or his parents or his young lady or his personal code of manly conduct is to give the offender a "sock" in the jaw.... My observation leads me to believe that it is not the virtuous people who are good at socking jaws.

A thing that nobody believes cannot be proved too often.

We are members one of another; so that you cannot injure or help your neighbor without injuring or helping yourself.

When people shake their heads because we are living in a restless age, ask them how they would like to life in a stationary one, and do without change