Nietzsche, to the end of his days, remained a Russian pastor's son, and hence two-thirds of a Puritan; he erected his war upon holiness, toward the end, into a sort of holy war.

[Government's] great contribution to human wisdom...is the discovery that the taxpayer has more than one pocket.

The public, with its mob yearning to be instructed, edified and pulled by the nose, demands certainties; it must be told definitely and a bit raucously that this is true and that is false. But there are no certainties.

Never underestimate the bad taste of the American public

A great literature is thus chiefly the product of doubting and inquiring minds in revolt against the immovable certainties of the nation.

The chief business of the nation, as a nation, is the setting up of heroes, mainly bogus.

Every reader of the Dreiser novels must cherish astounding specimens--of awkward, platitudinous marginalia, of whole scenes spoiled by bad writing, of phrases as brackish as so many lumps of sodium hyposulphite.