It is a peculiarity of the American mind that it regards any excursion into the truth as an adventure into cynicism.

The older I get the more I admire and crave competence, just simple competence, in any field from adultery to zoology.

All government, in its essence, is a conspiracy against the superior man: its one permanent object is to oppress him and cripple him.

One does not arise from such a book as Sister Carrie with a smirk of satisfaction; one leaves it infinitely touched.

A dull, dark, depressing day in Winter: the whole world looks like a Methodist church at Wednesday night prayer meeting.

The legislature, like the executive, has ceased to be even the creature of the people: it is the creature of pressure groups, and most of them, it must be manifest, are of dubious wisdom and even more dubious honesty. Laws are no longer made by a rational process of public discussion; they are made by a process of blackmail and intimidation, and they are executed in the same manner. The typical lawmaker of today is a man wholly devoid of principle...

[Thomas Henry] Huxley, I believe, was the greatest Englishman of the Nineteenth Century—perhaps the greatest Englishman of all time. When one thinks of him, one thinks inevitably of such men as Goethe and Aristotle. For in him there was that rich, incomparable blend of intelligence and character, of colossal knowledge and high adventurousness, of instinctive honesty and indomitable courage which appears in mankind only once in a blue moon. There have been far greater scientists, even in England, but there has never been a scientist who was a greater man.