I know of no existing nation that deserves to live, and I know of very few individuals.

It takes a long while for a naturally trustful person to reconcile himself to the idea that after all God will not help him

It seems to me that you are better off, as a writer and as an American, in a small town than you'd be in New York. I thoroughly detest New York, though I have to go there very often.... Have you ever noticed that no American writer of any consequence lives in Manhattan? Dreiser tried it (after many years in the Bronx), but finally moved to California.

Morality is doing what is right, no matter what you are told. Religion is doing what you are told, no matter what is right.

There are no institutions in America: there are only fashions.

The first Rotarian was the first man to call John the Baptist Jack.

By profession a biologist, [Thomas Henry Huxley] covered in fact the whole field of the exact sciences, and then bulged through its four fences. Absolutely nothing was uninteresting to him. His curiosity ranged from music to theology and from philosophy to history. He didn't simply know something about everything; he knew a great deal about everything.