Never drink if you've got any work to do. Never.

Taxation, for example, is eternally lively; it concerns nine-tenths of us more directly than either smallpox or golf, and has just as much drama in it; moreover, it has been mellowed and made gay by as many gaudy, preposterous theories

The American people, I am convinced, really detest free speech. At the slightest alarm they are ready and eager to put it down.

Such is the art of writing as Dreiser understands it and practices it--an endless piling up of minutiae, an almost ferocious tracking down of ions, electrons and molecules, an unshakable determination to tell it all. One is amazed by the mole-like diligence of the man, and no less by his exasperating disregard for the ease of his readers.

The only way to reconcile science and religion is to set up something which is not science and something that is not religion.

The curse of man, and the cause of nearly all his woe, is his stupendous capacity for believing the incredible.

A dull, dark, depressing day in Winter: the whole world looks like a Methodist church at Wednesday night prayer meeting.