I want to be advertised and the easiest way is to do something obnoxious and do it well.

After Gibbs, one the most distinguished [American scientists] was Langley, of the Smithsonian. ... He had the physicist's heinous fault of professing to know nothing between flashes of intense perception. ... Rigidly denying himself the amusement of philosophy, which consists chiefly in suggesting unintelligible answers to insoluble problems, and liked to wander past them in a courteous temper, even bowing to them distantly as though recognizing their existence, while doubting their respectibility.

Whenever a man reaches the top of the political ladder, his enemies unite to pull him down. His friends become critical and exacting.

A congressman is a pig. The only way to get his snout from the trough is to rap it sharply with a stick.

If I grapple with sin in my own strength, the devil knows he may go to sleep.

Some day science may have the existence of mankind in its power, and the human race commit suicide, by blowing up the world.

The spider-mind acquires a faculty of memory, and, with it, a singular skill of analysis and synthesis, taking apart and putting together in different relations the meshes of its trap. Man had in the beginning no power of analysis or synthesis approaching that of the spider, or even of the honey-bee; but he had acute sensibility to the higher forces.