The value the world sets upon motives is often grossly unjust and inaccurate.

The average schoolmaster is and always must be essentially an ass, for how can one imagine an intelligent man engaging in so puerile an avocation.

Politics, as hopeful men practise it in the world, consists mainly of the delusion that a change in form is a change in substance.

The other day a dog peed on me. A bad sign.

No man ever quite believes in any other man. One may believe in an idea absolutely, but not in a man. In the highest confidence there is always a flavor of doubt--a feeling, half instinctive and half logical, that, after all, the scoundrel may have something up his sleeve.

...no man of genuinely superior intelligence has ever been an actor. Even supposing a young man of appreciable mental powers to be lured upon the stage, as philosophers are occasionally lured into bordellos, his mind would be inevitably and almost immediately destroyed by the gaudy nonsense issuing from his mouth every night.

The only really respectable Protestants are the fundamentalists. Unfortunately, they are also palpable idiots.