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

All taxation is an evil, but heavy taxes, indiscriminately levied on every everything are one of the greatest curses that can afflict a people

In the one branch he most needed

History is the most aristocratic of all literary pursuits, because it obliges the historian to be rich as well as educated.

[P]olitical and social and scientific values ... should be correlated in some relation of movement that could be expressed in mathematics, nor did one care in the least that all the world said it could not be done, or that one knew not enough mathematics even to figure a formula beyond the schoolboy s=(1/2)gt2. If Kepler and Newton could take liberties with the sun and moon, an obscure person ... could take liberties with Congress, and venture to multiply its attraction into the square of its time. He had only to find a value, even infinitesimal, for its attraction.

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 chief wonder of education is that it does not ruin everybody concerned in it, teachers and taught.