We despise all reverences and all objects of reverence which are outside the pale of our list of sacred things. And yet, with strange inconsistency, we are shocked when other people despise and defile the things which are holy to us.

The government is merely a servant―merely a temporary servant; it cannot be its prerogative to determine what is right and what is wrong, and decide who is a patriot and who isn't. Its function is to obey orders, not originate them.

There are those who scoff at the schoolboy, calling him frivolous and shallow: Yet it was the schoolboy who said 'Faith is believing what you know ain't so'.

The New York papers have long known that no large question is ever really settled until I have been consulted.

You can't throw too much style into a miracle.

If ignorance is bliss, why isn't the world happier?

In the first place, God made idiots. That was for practice. Then he made school boards.