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

If I grapple with sin in my own strength, the devil knows he may go to sleep.

The capacity of women to make unsuitable marriages must be considered as the cornerstone of society.

I would rather starve and rot and keep the privilege of speaking the truth as I see it, than of holding all the offices that capital has to give from the presidency down.

In practice, such trifles as contradictions in principle are easily set aside; the faculty of ignoring them makes the practical man.

The idea that any personal deity could find pleasure or profit in torturing a poor woman, by accident, with a fiendish cruelty known to man only in perverted and insane temperaments, could not be held for a moment. For pure blasphemy, it made pure atheism a comfort.

My favorite figure of the American author is that of a man who breeds a favorite dog, which he throws into the Mississippi River for the pleasure of making a splash. The river does not splash, but it drowns the dog.