In practice, such trifles as contradictions in principle are easily set aside; the faculty of ignoring them makes the practical man.

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.

One sought not absolute truth. One sought only a spool on which to wind the thread of history without breaking it.

As History stands, it is a sort of Chinese Play, without end and without lesson.

Chaos breeds life; Order creates habit.

The gothic is singular in this; one seems easily at home in the renaissance; one is not too strange in the Byzantine; as for the Roman, it is ourselves; and we could walk blindfolded through every chink and cranny of the Greek mind; all these styles seem modern when we come close to them; but the gothic gets away.

As for piracy, I love to be pirated. It is the greatest compliment an author can have. The wholesale piracy of Democracy was the single real triumph of my life. Anyone may steal what he likes from me.