Charm was a scheme for making strangers like and trust a person immediately, no matter what the charmer had in mind.

As stupid and vicious as men are, this is a lovely day.

War is now a form of TV entertainment, and what made the First World War so particularly entertaining were two American inventions, barbed wire and the machine gun.

That is my principal objection to life, I think: It's too easy, when alive, to make perfectly horrible mistakes.

Well, it's an ancestral tribe. These were immigrants from north of Germany who came here about the time of the Civil War, but anyway, these people called themselves free thinkers. They were impressed, incidentally, by Darwin. They're called Humanists now; people who aren't so sure that the Bible is the Word of God.

True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.

I think William Shakespeare was the wisest human being I ever heard of. To be perfectly frank, though, that's not saying much.