Power is poison. Its effect on Presidents had always been tragic.

The chief wonder of education is that it does not ruin everybody concerned in it, teachers and taught.

Practical politics consists in ignoring facts.

I hate photographs abstractly, because they have given me more ideas perversely and immovably wrong, than I ever should get by imagination.

Friends are born, not made.

As history stands, it is a sort of Chinese play, without end andl without lesson. With these impressions I wrote the last line of my History, asking for a round century before going further.

I think that Lee should have been hanged. It was all the worse that he was a good man and a fine character and acted conscientiously... It's always the good men who do the most harm in the world.