Morality is a private and costly luxury.

The work of internal government has become the task of controlling the thousands of fifth-rate men.

The American man is a very simple and cheap mechanism. The American woman I find a complicated and expensive one. Contrasts of feminine types are possible. I am not absolutely sure that there is more than one American man.

Everyone carries his own inch rule of taste, and amuses himself by applying it, triumphantly, wherever he travels.

An American Virgin would never dare command; an American Venus would never dare exist.

Artists... disappeared long ago as social forces. So did the church.

Power is poison. Its effect on Presidents had always been tragic, chiefly as an almost insane excitement at first, and a worse reaction afterwards.