The Almighty is a wonderful handicapper: He will not give us everything.

My father's nature turned out no waste product; he had none of that useless stuff in him that lies in heaps near factories. He took his own happiness with him.

It is always dangerous to generalize, but the American people, while infinitely generous, are a hard and strong race and, but for the few cemeteries I have seen, I am inclined to think they never die.

[On spiritualism:] I always knew the living talked rot, but it's nothing to the rot the dead talk.

She tells enough white lies to ice a wedding cake.

The ingrained idea that, because there is no king and they despise titles, the Americans are a free people is pathetically untrue. . . . There is a perpetual interference with personal liberty over there that would not be tolerated in England for a week.

I was born in the country of Hogg and Scott between the Yarrow and the Tweed, in the year 1864.