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.

As for America, it is the ideal fruit of all your youthful hopes and reforms. Everybody is fairly decent, respectable, domestic, bourgeois, middle-class, and tiresome. There is absolutely nothing to revile except that it's a bore.

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

Knowledge of human nature is the beginning and end of political education.

As for piracy, I love to be pirated. It is the greatest compliment an author can have. The wholesale piracy of Democracy was the single real triumph of my life. Anyone may steal what he likes from me.

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.

It [love] is a disease to be born with patience, like any nervous complaint, and to be treated with counter-irritants.