I was some of the mud that got to sit up and look around. Lucky me, lucky mud.

If your brains were dynamite there wouldn't be enough to blow your hat off.

Wake up, you idiots! Whatever made you think that money was so valuable?

We are America's Great Lakes people, her freshwater people, not an oceanic but a continental people. Whenever I swim in an ocean, I feel as though I am swimming in chicken soup.

This is what I find encouraging about the writing trades: ... They allow lunatics to seem saner than sane.

What he meant, of course, was that there would always be wars, that they were as easy to stop as glaciers. I believe that, too. And even if wars didn't keep coming like glaciers, there would still be plain old death.

My ancestors were all Freethinkers, formerly Catholics. It was science and Darwin, in particular, that made them decide, as educated people, which they were, that the priest, nice as he was, didn't know what he was talking about.