Annihilation has no terrors for me, because I have already tried it before I was born -a hundred million years -and I have suffered more in an hour, in this life, than I remember to have suffered in the whole hundred million years put together. There was a peace, a serenity, an absence of all sense of responsibility, an absence of worry, an absence of care, grief, perplexity; and the presence of a deep content and unbroken satisfaction in that hundred million years of holiday which I look back upon with a tender longing and with a grateful desire to resume, when the opportunity comes.

I do not like an injurious lie, except when it injures somebody else.

It is a wise child that knows its own father, and an unusual one that unreservedly approves of him.

A country without a patent office and good patent laws is just a crab, and can't travel any way but sideways and backways.

What a man misses mostly in heaven is company.

...one of the first achievements of the legislature was to institute a ten-thousand-dollar agricultural fair to show off forty dollars' worth of pumpkins in - however, the Territorial legislature was usually spoken of as the "asylum".

If work were so pleasant, the rich would keep it for themselves.