The whole fabric of society will go to wrack if we really lay hands of reform on our rotten institutions. From top to bottom the whole system is a fraud, all of us know it, laborers and capitalists alike, and all of us are consenting parties to it.

If one shed tears, they must be shed on one's pillow.

One sought not absolute truth. One sought only a spool on which to wind the thread of history without breaking it.

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

History will die if not irritated. The only service I can do to my profession is to serve as a flea.

After Gibbs, one the most distinguished [American scientists] was Langley, of the Smithsonian. ... He had the physicist's heinous fault of professing to know nothing between flashes of intense perception. ... Rigidly denying himself the amusement of philosophy, which consists chiefly in suggesting unintelligible answers to insoluble problems, and liked to wander past them in a courteous temper, even bowing to them distantly as though recognizing their existence, while doubting their respectibility.

American art, like the American language and American education, was as far as possible sexless.