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.

The less a tourist knows, the fewer mistakes he need make, for he will not expect himself to explain ignorance.

One could not stay a month without loving the shabby town

Absolute liberty is absence of restraint; responsibility is restraint; therefore, the ideally free individual is responsible to himself.

The Virgin filled so enormous a space in the life and thought of the time that one stands now helpless before the mass of testimony to her direct action and constant presence in every moment and form of the illusion which men thought they thought their existence.

Practical politics consists in ignoring facts.

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