The imagination can be happy in places where the whole man is not.

The insidiousness of science lies in its claim to be not a subject, but a method.

Civilization is merely an advance in taste: accepting, all the time, nicer things, and rejecting nasty ones.

... when you make it a moral necessity for the young to dabble in all the subjects that the books on the top shelf are written about, you kill two very large birds with one stone: you satisfy precious curiosities, and you make them believe that they know as much about life as people who really know something. If college boys are solemnly advised to listen to lectures on prostitution, they will listen; and who is to blame if some time, in a less moral moment, they profit by their information?

What passes for an original opinion is, generally, merely an original phrase. Old lamps for new - yes; but it is always the same oil in the lamp.

if you are perfectly willing to shock an individual verbally, the next thing you will be doing is to shock him practically.

You can be slum-born and slum-bred and still achieve something worth while; but it is a stupid inverted snobbishness to be proud of it. If one had a right to be proud of anything, it would be of a continued decent tradition back of one.