After Gibbs, one the most distinguished [American scientists] was Langley, of the Smithsonian. ... He had the physicist's heinous fault of professing to know nothing between flashes of intense perception. ... Rigidly denying himself the amusement of philosophy, which consists chiefly in suggesting unintelligible answers to insoluble problems, and liked to wander past them in a courteous temper, even bowing to them distantly as though recognizing their existence, while doubting their respectibility.

All experience is an arch, to build upon.

The tourist was the great conservative who hated novelty and adored dirt.

Practical politics consists in ignoring facts.

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

As History stands, it is a sort of Chinese Play, without end and without lesson.

The American man is a very simple and cheap mechanism. The American woman I find a complicated and expensive one. Contrasts of feminine types are possible. I am not absolutely sure that there is more than one American man.