After all is said and done, a hell lot of a lot more is said than done.

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.

If there were only three women left in the world, two of them would immediately convene a court-martial to try the other one.

A professional politician is a professionally dishonorable man. In order to get anywhere near high office he has to make so many compromises and submit to so many humiliations that he becomes indistinguishable from a streetwalker.

Setting aside the vast herd which shows no definable character at all, it seems to me that the minority distinguished by what is commonly regarded as an excess of sin is very much more admirable than the minority distinguished by an excess of virtue. My experience of the world has taught me that the average wine-bibbler is a far better fellow than the average prohibitionist, and that the average rogue is better company than the average poor drudge, and that the worst white-slave trader of my acquaintance is a decenter man than the best vice crusader.

Capital punishment has probably been responsible for a good deal of human progress. The overwhelming majority of those executed were of the sort whose departures for bliss eternal improved the average intelligence and decency of the race.

The longest sentence you can form with two words is: I do.