Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit.

My belief is that science is to wreck us, and that we are like monkeys monkeying with a loaded shell; we don't in the least know or care where our practically infinite energies come from or will bring us to.

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.

Power is poison. Its effect on Presidents had always been tragic, chiefly as an almost insane excitement at first, and a worse reaction afterwards.

History is a tangled skein that one may take up at any point, and break when one has unravelled enough.

Susceptibility to the highest forces is the highest genius.

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.