What is too often forgotten is that nature obviously intends the botched to die, and that every interference with that benign process is full of dangers.

Human life is basically a comedy. Even its tragedies often seem comic to the spectator, and not infrequently they actually have comic touches to the victim. Happiness probably consists largely in the capacity to detect and relish them. A man who can laugh, if only at himself, is never really miserable.

The central belief of every moron is that he is the victim of a mysterious conspiracy against his common rights and true deserts.

Every lynching deprives its victim of his life without due process of law, and denies him an equal protection of the law. The States are charged with punishing all such invasions as the common rights of the citizens, but some of them have failed in their effort to do so, and others have not honestly tried. Meanwhile, lynchings continue, and though they do not increase in number, they show some tendency to increase in savagery.

Hope: A pathological belief in the occurrence of the impossible.

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

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