The sensation of seeing extremely fine women, with superb forms, perfectly unconscious of undress, and yet evidently aware of their beauty and dignity, is worth a week's seasickness to experience... [to me] the effect [of a Siva dance] was that of a dozen Rembrandts intensified into the most glowing beauty of life and motion.

Every man should have a fair-sized cemetary in which to bury the faults of his friends.

There is no such thing as an underestimate of average intelligence.

Mr Jefferson meant that the American system should be a democracy, and he would rather have let the whole world perish than that this principle, which to him represented all that man was worth, should fail. Mr Hamilton considered democracy a fatal curse, and meant to stop its progress.

People here are quite struck aback at Sunday's news of the capture of New Orleans. It took them three days to make up their minds to believe it. The division of American had become an idea so fixed that they had about shut out all the avenues to the reception of any other.

The Indian Summer of life should be a little sunny and a little sad, like the season, and infinite in wealth and depth of tone, but never hustled.

I think that Lee should have been hanged. It was all the worse that he was a good man and a fine character and acted conscientiously... It's always the good men who do the most harm in the world.