Everybody thinks that this civilization has lasted a very long time but it really does take very few grandfathers' granddaughters to take us back to the dark ages.

More great Americans were failures than they were successes. They mostly spent their lives in not having a buyer for what they had for sale.

The United States is just now the oldest country in the world, there always is an oldest country and she is it, it is she who is the mother of the twentieth century civilization. She began to feel herself as it just after the Civil War. And so it is a country the right age to have been born in and the wrong age to live in.

French people do like good fighting, they like it better than anything.

I do want to get rich but I never want to do what there is to do to get rich.

You never answer a question nobody does.

A creator is not in advance of his generation but he is the first of his contemporaries to be conscious of what is happening to his generation.