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.

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

Boys naturally look on all force as an enemy.

The work of internal government has become the task of controlling the thousands of fifth-rate men.

The first serious consciousness of Nature's gesture - her attitude towards life-took form then as a phantasm, a nightmare, all insanity of force. For the first time, the stage-scenery of the senses collapsed; the human mind felt itself stripped naked, vibrating in a void of shapeless energies, with resistless mass, colliding, crushing, wasting, and destroying what these same energies had created and labored from eternity to perfect.

Artists... disappeared long ago as social forces. So did the church.

The photograph is a coarse fraud, and seems to delight only in taking the whole beauty out of the picture.