The great difficulty about keeping the Ten Commandments is that no man can keep them and be a gentleman.

Any man who afflicts the human race with ideas must be prepared to see them misunderstood.

Why do men go to zoos?

The feelings that Beethoven put into his music were the feelings of a god. There was something olympian in his snarls and rages, and there was a touch of hellfire in his mirth.

The only way that a government can provide for jobs for all citizens is by deciding what every man should do.

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.

The true function of art is to criticize, embellish and edit nature… the artist is a sort of impassioned proof-reader, blue penciling the bad spelling of God.