The craft of writing is the art of penetrating other minds with the figures that are in your own mind.

We may be thankful that frightened civil authorities ... have not managed to eradicate from the country the tradition of the possession and use of firearms, that profound and almost instinctive tradition of Americans. Luckily for us, our tradition of bearing arms has not gone from the country, the tradition is so deep and so dear to us that it is one of the most treasured parts of the Bill of Rights - the right of all Americans to bear arms, with the implication that they will know how to use them.

A dying people tolerates the present, rejects the future, and finds its satisfactions in past greatness and half remembered glory

Books are the best friends you can have; they inform you, and entertain you, and they don't talk back.

Some men ease themselves like setting hens into the nest of death.

Well, every little boy thinks he invented sin. Virtue we think we learn, because we are told about it. But sin is our own designing.

In business and in politics a man must carve and maul his way through men to get to be King of the Mountain. Once there, he can be great and kind-but he must get there first.