I think a compliment ought always to precede a complaint, where one is possible, because it softens resentment and insures for the complaint a courteous and gentle reception.

Jane Austen's books, too, are absent from this library. Just that one omission alone would make a fairly good library out of a library that hadn't a book in it.

Repartee is something we think of twenty-four hours too late.

In my schoolboy days I had no aversion to slavery. I was not aware there was anything wrong about it. No-one arraigned it in my hearing; the local papers said nothing against it; the local pulpit taught us that God approved it, that it was a holy thing, and that the doubter need only look in the Bible if he wished to settle his mind.

Let us be grateful to Adam: he cut us out of the blessing of idleness and won for us the curse of labor.

One day man by the slow processes of evolution shall develop into something really fine and high - some billions of years hence, say.

Principles aren't of much account anyway, except at election time. After that you hang them up to let them season.