Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.

Thanksgiving Day - Let all give humble, hearty, and sincere thanks, now, but the turkeys. In the island of Fiji they do not use turkeys, they use plumbers. It does not become you and me to sneer at Fiji.

...one should be gentle with the ignorant, for they are the chosen of God.

The most outrageous lies that can be invented will find believers if a person only tells them with all his might.

A big leather-bound volume makes an ideal razorstrap. A thing book is useful to stick under a table with a broken caster to steady it. A large, flat atlas can be used to cover a window with a broken pane. And a thick, old-fashioned heavy book with a clasp is the finest thing in the world to throw at a noisy cat.

Medicine has made all its progress during the past fifty years. ... How many operations that are now in use were known fifty years ago?-they were not operations, they were executions.

In statesmanship get formalities right, never mind about the moralities.