Society is immoral and immortal; it can afford to commit any kind of folly, and indulge in any sort of vice; it cannot be killed, and the fragments that survive can always laugh at the dead.

My own conclusion is that history is simply social development along the lines of weakest resistance, and that in most cases the line of weakest resistance is found as unconsciously by society as by water.

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

American politics is a struggle, not of men but of forces. The men become every year more and more creatures of force, massed about central power houses.

They know enough who know how to learn.

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.

For reasons which many persons thought ridiculous, Mrs. Lightfoot Lee decided to pass the winter in Washington.