What chiefly distinguishes the daily press is its incurable fear of ideas, its constant effort to evade the discussion of fundamentals by translating all issues into a few elemental fears, its incessant reduction of all reflection to mere emotion.

The worst of marriage is that it makes a woman believe that all men are just as easy to fool.

New York is the place where all the aspirations of the western world meet to form one vast master aspiration, as powerful as the suction of a steam dredge. It is the icing on the pie called Christian civilization.

Next to the semi-colon, quotation marks seem to be the chief butts of reformatory ardor.

Democracy the domination of unreflective and timorous men, moved in vast herds by mob conditions.

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

The legislature, like the executive, has ceased to be even the creature of the people: it is the creature of pressure groups, and most of them, it must be manifest, are of dubious wisdom and even more dubious honesty. Laws are no longer made by a rational process of public discussion; they are made by a process of blackmail and intimidation, and they are executed in the same manner. The typical lawmaker of today is a man wholly devoid of principle...