The trouble with Communism is the Communists, just as the trouble with Christianity is the Christians.

Philosophy, as the modern world knows it, is only intellectual club-swinging.

A living language is like a man suffering incessantly from small hemorrhages, and what it needs above all else is constant transactions of new blood from other tongues. The day the gates go up, that day it begins to die.

Experience is a poor guide to man, and is seldom followed. What really teaches a man is not experience, but observation.

If there was ever a dissenter from the national optimismit was surely Edgar Allan Poe--without question the bravest and mostoriginal, if perhaps also the least orderly and judicious, of all the critics that we have produced.

To large numbers of American citizens life in certain parts of the country becomes intolerably hazardous. They may be seized on any pretext, however flimsy, and put to death with horrible tortures. No government pretending to be civilized can go on condoning such atrocities. Either it must make every possible effort to put them down or it must suffer the scorn and contempt of Christendom.

Balloonists have an unsurpassed view of the scenery, but there is always the possibility that it may collide with them.