Any attempt to speak without speaking any particular language is not more hopeless than the attempt to have a religion that shall be no religion in particular.... Every living and healthy religion has a marked idiosyncrasy. Its power consists in its special and surprising message and the bias which that revelation gives to life.

There is no greater stupidity or meanness than to take uniformity for an ideal.

There is nothing to which men, while they have food and drink, cannot reconcile themselves.

To know what people really think, pay regard to what they do, rather than what they say.

A country without a memory is a country of madmen.

Nothing so much enhances a good as to make sacrifices for it.

The aim of life is some way of living, as flexible and gentle as human nature; so that ambition may stoop to kindness, and philosophy to condor and humor. Neither prosperity nor empire nor heaven can be worth winning at the price of a virulent temper, bloody hands, an anguished spirit, and a vain hatred of the rest of the world.