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.

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

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.

Whenever a man reaches the top of the political ladder, his enemies unite to pull him down. His friends become critical and exacting.

You may cut off the heads of every rich man now living--of every statesman--every literary, and every scientific authority, without in the least changing the social situation. Artists, of course, disappeared long ago as social forces. So did the church. Corporations are not elevators, but levellers, as I see them.

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

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