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

In the history of the United States, there is no continuity at all. You can cut through it anywhere and nothing on this side of the cut has anything to do with anything on the other side.

Some day science may have the existence of mankind in its power, and the human race commit suicide, by blowing up the world.

Silence alone is respectable and respected. I believe God to be silence.

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

Politics is simply the organization of hatreds.

[P]olitical and social and scientific values ... should be correlated in some relation of movement that could be expressed in mathematics, nor did one care in the least that all the world said it could not be done, or that one knew not enough mathematics even to figure a formula beyond the schoolboy s=(1/2)gt2. If Kepler and Newton could take liberties with the sun and moon, an obscure person ... could take liberties with Congress, and venture to multiply its attraction into the square of its time. He had only to find a value, even infinitesimal, for its attraction.