The history of our race, and each individual’s experience, are sown thick with evidence that a truth is not hard to kill and that a lie told well is immortal.

All you need is ignorance and confidence and the success is sure.

Every inventor is a crackpot until his idea succeeds.

The banging and slamming and booming and crashing were something beyond belief. [On Lohengrin]

Humorists of the 'mere' sort cannot survive. Humor is only a fragrance, a decoration.

The minute we get reconciled to a person, how willing we are to throw aside little needless punctilios and pronounce his name right.

Concentration of power in a political machine is bad; and an Established Church is only a political machine; it was invented for that; it is nursed, cradled, preserved for that; it is an enemy to human liberty, and does no good which it could not better do in a split-up and scattered condition.