Henry James would have been vastly improved as a novelist by a few whiffs of the Chicago stockyard.

The New Deal began, like the Salvation Army, by promising to save humanity. It ended, again like the Salvation Army, by running flop-houses and disturbing the peace.

The great artists of the world are never Puritans, and seldom even ordinarily respectable.

The art of writing, like the art of love, runs all the way from a kind of routine hard to distinguish from piling bricks to a kind of frenzy closely related to delirium tremens.

He slept more than any other president, whether by day or by night. Nero fiddled, but Coolidge only snored.

Hygiene is the corruption of medicine by morality.

The truth, indeed, is something that mankind, for some mysterious reason, instinctively dislikes. Every man who tries to tell it is unpopular, and even when, by the sheer strength of his case, he prevails, he is put down as a scoundrel.