Charles Sumner's mind had reached the calm of WATER which receives and reflects images without absorbing them; it contains nothing but itself.

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

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

A congressman is a pig. The only way to get his snout from the trough is to rap it sharply with a stick.

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.

Unity is vision; it must have been part of the process of learning to see.

My favorite figure of the American author is that of a man who breeds a favorite dog, which he throws into the Mississippi River for the pleasure of making a splash. The river does not splash, but it drowns the dog.