Politics, as a practise, whatever its professions, has always been the systematic organization of hatreds.

History is only a value of relation.

If any one of us has had an ambition higher than that of making money; a motive better than that of expediency; a faith warmer than that of reasoning; a love purer than that of the self; he has been slow to express it; still slower to urge it.

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

Everyone carries his own inch rule of taste, and amuses himself by applying it, triumphantly, wherever he travels.

No man means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous.

The social side of Washington was to be taken for granted as three-fourths of existence. Politics and reform became the detail, and waltzing the profession