It is impossible to underrate human intelligence - beginning with one's own.

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

Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed. The imagination must be given not wings but weights.

As for America, it is the ideal fruit of all your youthful hopes and reforms. Everybody is fairly decent, respectable, domestic, bourgeois, middle-class, and tiresome. There is absolutely nothing to revile except that it's a bore.

To my fancy, one looks back on life, it has only two responsibilities, which include all the others: one is the bringing of new life into existence; the other, educating it after it is brought in. All betrayals of trust result from these original sins.

Simplicity is the most deceitful mistress that ever betrayed man.

He too serves a certain purpose who only stands and cheers.