Too much of anything is bad, but too much good whiskey is barely enough.

Many public-school children seem to know only two dates—1492 and 4th of July; and as a rule they don't know what happened on either occasion.

[N]o country can be well governed unless its citizens as a body keep religiously before their minds that they are the guardians of the law and that the law officers are only the machinery for its execution, nothing more.

Every person is a book, each year a chapter.

I'm all for prosperity. It's change I object to.

In a good bookroom you feel in some mysterious way that you are absorbing the wisdom contained in all the books through your skin, without even opening them.

[Patriotism] ...is a word which always commemorates a robbery. There isn't a foot of land in the world which doesn't represent the ousting and re-ousting of a longline of successive "owners" who each in turn, as "patriots" with proud swelling hearts defended it against the next gang of "robbers" who came to steal it and did -- and became swelling-hearted patriots in their turn.