Adam was the author of sin, and I wish he had taken out an international copyright on it.

The Impartial Friend: Death, the only immortal who treats us all alike, whose pity and whose peace and whose refuge are for all--the soiled and the pure, the rich and the poor, the loved and the unloved.

In religion and politics, people's belief's and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second hand, and without examination

It has been reported that I was seriously ill--it was another man; dying--it was another man; dead--the other man again...As far as I can see, nothing remains to be reported, except that I have become a foreigner. When you hear it, don't you believe it. And don't take the trouble to deny it. Merely just raise the American flag on our house in Hartford and let it talk.

Once you've put one of his [Henry James] books down, you simply can't pick it up again.

The trouble with the world is not that people know too little; it's that they know so many things that just aren't so.

I'm the only person who has ever found the right way to build an autobiography.