The objection of the scandalmonger is not that she tells of racy doings, but that she pretends to be indignant about them.

The truth is that the scientific value of Polar exploration is greatly exaggerated. The thing that takes men on such hazardous trips is really not any thirst for knowledge, but simply a yearning for adventure. ... A Polar explorer always talks grandly of sacrificing his fingers and toes to science. It is an amiable pretention, but there is no need to take it seriously.

The theatre, when all is said and done, is not life in miniature, but life enormously magnified, life hideously exaggerated.

School days, I believe, are the unhappiest in the whole span of human existence.

A man loses his sense of direction after four drinks; a woman loses hers after four kisses.

As long as the Southern colleges have revivals on their campuses and students get converted to Methodism and join the YMCA and are accepted as gentlemen, it will be impossible to think of the South as civilized...The educated folk of the Old South took theology lightly, and religion to them was hardly more than a charming ritual, useful on solemn occassions.

The instant I reach Heaven, I'm going to speak to God very sharply.