If man could be crossed with the cat, it would improve man but deteriorate the cat.

Crowds stand around all day long and criticise that bridge, and find fault with it, and tell with unlimited frankness how it ought to have been planned, and how they would have built it had the city granted them the $14,000 it cost. It is really refreshing to hang around these and listen to them. A foreigner would come to the conclusion that all America was composed of inspired professional bridge builders.

Missionarying was a better thing in those days than it is in ours. All you had to do was to cure the head savage´s sick daughter by a miracle- a miracle like the miracle of Lourdes in our day, for instance- and immediately that head savage was your convert, and filled to the eyes with a new convert´s enthusiasm. You could sit down and make yourself easy now. He would take the ax and convert the rest of the nation himself.

An Englishman is a person who does things because they have been done before. An American is a person who does things because they haven't been done before.

To my mind that literature is best and most enduring which is characterized by a noble simplicity.

We write frankly and freely, but then we modify before we print.

To refuse awards is another way of accepting them with more noise than is normal.