If I can put one touch of rosy sunset into the life of any man or woman, I shall feel that I have worked with God.

I would look at the first chapter of any new novel as a final test of its merits. If there was a murdered man under the sofa in the first chapter, I read the story. If there was no murdered man under the sofa in the first chapter, I dismissed the story as tea-table twaddle, which it often really was.

The power which makes a man able to entertain a good impulse is the same as that which enables him to make a good gun; it is imagination.

A great man knows he is not God, and the greater he is the better he knows it.

The only defensible war is a war of defense.

Americans are a very backward people, with all the real virtues of a backward people; the patriarchal simplicity and human dignity of a democracy, and a respect for labor uncorrupted by cynicism.

The comedy of man survives the tragedy of man.