Philadelphia is the most pecksniffian of American cities, and thus probably leads the world.

Man's objection to love is that it dies hard: women's, that when it is dead it stays dead.

The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.

When you sympathize with a married woman you either make two enemies or gain one wife and one friend.

Human progress is furthered, not by conformity, but by aberration.

The fundamental trouble with marriage is that it shakes a man's confidence in himself, and so greatly diminishes his general competence and effectiveness. His habit of mind becomes that of a commander who has lost a decisive and calamitous battle. He quite trusts himself thereafter.

The effort to reconcile science and religion is almost always made, not by theologians, but by scientists unable to shake off altogether the piety absorbed with their mother's milk.