As an old soldier, I admit the cowardice: it's as universal as seasickness, and matters just as little.

No community has ever yet passed beyond the initial phases in which its pugnacity and fanaticism enabled it to found a nation, and its cupidity to establish and develop a commercial civilization.

You'll never have a quiet world till you knock the patriotism out of the human race.

Man's inhumanity to man is only surpassed by his cruelty to animals

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.

A man of my spiritual intensity does not eat corpses.

The plain working truth is that it is not only good for people to be shocked occasionally, but absolutely necessary to the progress of society that they should be shocked pretty often.