Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts.

The press is the hired agent of a monied system, and set up for no other purpose than to tell lies where their interests are involved. One can trust nobody and nothing.

History is the most aristocratic of all literary pursuits, because it obliges the historian to be rich as well as educated.

It is always good men who do the most harm in the world.

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

You say that love is nonsense. I tell you it is no such thing. For weeks and months it is a steady physical pain, an ache about the heart, never leaving one, by night or by day; a long strain on one's nerves like toothache or rheumatism, not intolerable at any one instant, but exhausting by its steady drain on the strength.

The idea that any personal deity could find pleasure or profit in torturing a poor woman, by accident, with a fiendish cruelty known to man only in perverted and insane temperaments, could not be held for a moment. For pure blasphemy, it made pure atheism a comfort.