Whenever A annoys or injures B on the pretense of saving or improving X, A is a scoundrel.

It seems to me that a great university ought to have room in it for men subscribing to every sort of idea that is currently prevalent

What are the characters that I discern most clearly in the so-called Anglo-Saxon type of man? I may answer at once that two stickout above all others. One is his curious and apparently incurable incompetence--his congenital inability to do any difficult thing easily and well, whether it be isolating a bacillus or writing a sonata. The other is his astounding susceptibility to fears and alarms--in short, his hereditary cowardice.... There is no record in history of any Anglo-Saxon nation entering upon any great war without allies.

The curse of man, and the cause of nearly all his woe, is his stupendous capacity for believing the incredible.

I can't imagine a genuinely intelligent boy getting much out of college, even out of a good college, save it be a cynical habit of mind.

It takes no more actual sagacity to carry on the everyday hawking and haggling of the world, or to ladle out its normal doses of bad medicine and worse law, than it takes to operate a taxicab or fry a pan of fish.

He sailed through American history like a steel ship loaded with monoliths of granite.