Thank God, I never was cheerful. I come from the happy stock of the Mathers, who, as you remember, passed sweet mornings reflecting on the goodness of God and the damnation of infants.

American art, like the American language and American education, was as far as possible sexless.

Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit.

Boys naturally look on all force as an enemy.

Charles Sumner's mind had reached the calm of WATER which receives and reflects images without absorbing them; it contains nothing but itself.

Power is poison. Its effect on Presidents had always been tragic, chiefly as an almost insane excitement at first, and a worse reaction afterwards.

Susceptibility to the highest forces is the highest genius.