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.

American society is a sort of flat, fresh-water pond which absorbs silently, without reaction, anything which is thrown into it.

Whenever a man reaches the top of the political ladder, his enemies unite to pull him down. His friends become critical and exacting.

Every one must bear his own universe, and most persons are moderately interested in learning how their neighbors have managed to carry theirs.

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.

An American Virgin would never dare command; an American Venus would never dare exist.

Modern politics is, at bottom, a struggle not of men but of forces. The men become every year more and more creatures of force, massed about central powerhouses. The conflict is no longer between the men, but between the motors that drive the men, and the men tend to succumb to their own motive forces.