The notion that anything is gained by fixing a language in a groove is cherished only by pedants.

The average schoolmaster is, and always must be, an ass.

No man of honor ever quite lives up to his code, any more than a moral man manages to avoid sin.

The American people, I am convinced, really detest free speech. At the slightest alarm they are ready and eager to put it down.

It is my conviction that no normal man ever fell in love, within the ordinary meaning of the term, after the age of thirty.

...no man of genuinely superior intelligence has ever been an actor. Even supposing a young man of appreciable mental powers to be lured upon the stage, as philosophers are occasionally lured into bordellos, his mind would be inevitably and almost immediately destroyed by the gaudy nonsense issuing from his mouth every night.

War may make a fool of man, but it by no means degrades him; on the contrary, it tends to exalt him, and its net effects are much like those of motherhood on women.