I firmly believe, that before many centuries more, science will be the master of man. The engines he will have invented will be beyond his strength to control. Someday, science shall have the existence of mankind in its power, and the human race commit suicide by blowing up the world.

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

History is only a catalogue of the forgotten.

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

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

I am fairly tired--bored beyond endurance--by the world we live in, and its ideals, and am ready to say so, not violently, but kindly, as one rubs salt into the back of a flogged sailor as though one loved him.

One friend in a life-time is much; two are many; three are hardly possible. Friendship needs a certain parallelism of life, a community of thought, a rivalry of aim.