You will be favourable to Burr, and so must fail because the American reader cannot bear a surprise. He knows that this is the greatest country on earth, Washington the greatest man that ever lived, Burr the wickedest, and evidence to the contrary is not admissible. That means no inconvenient facts, no new information. If you really want the reader's attention, you must flatter him. Make his prejudices your own. Tell him things he already knows. He will love your soundness.

Christianity is such a silly religion.

Now the long-feared Asiatic colossus takes its turn as world leader, and we--the white race--have become the yellow man's burden.Let us hope that he will treat us more kindly than we treated him.

Love, like a sense of humor, is now claimed by everyone even though Love, like a sense of humor, is rather more rare than not, and to most of us poor muddlers unbearable at full strength.

I'd say that Holland, Sweden, and Denmark are all better countries politically than the United States. The average person is far better off in one of those countries than he is in the United States and poverty of the sort that we have is absolutely unknown in Northern Europe.

Today's public figures can no longer write their own speeches or books, and there is some evidence that they can't read them either.

Great critics do not explicate a text; they describe it and then report on what they have described, if the description itself is not the criticism.