The progress of evolution from President Washington to President Grant was alone evidence to upset Darwin.

You can't use tact with a Congressman! A Congressman is a hog! You must take a stick and hit him on the snout!

The habit of expression leads to the search for something to express. Something remains as a residuum of the commonplace itself, if one strikes out every commonplace in the expression.

Mathematicians practice absolute freedom.

The great word Evolution had not yet, in 1860, made a new religion of history, but the old religion had preached the same doctrinefor a thousand years without finding in the entire history of Rome anything but flat contradiction.

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

Henry James chews more than he bites off.