I know the look of an apple that is roasting and sizzling on the hearth on a winter's evening, and I know the comfort that comes of eating it hot, along with some sugar and a drench of cream... I know how the nuts taken in conjunction with winter apples, cider, and doughnuts, make old people's tales and old jokes sound fresh and crisp and enchanting.

When you want genuine music -- music that will come right home to you like a bad quarter, suffuse your system like strychnine whisky, go right through you like Brandreth's pills, ramify your whole constitution like the measles, and break out on your hide like the pin-feather pimples on a picked goose, -- when you want all this, just smash your piano, and invoke the glory-beaming banjo!

Conservatism is the blind and fear-filled worship of dead radicals.

Is the human race a joke? Was it devised and patched together in a dull time when there was nothing important to do?

It is curious that physical courage should be so common in the world and moral courage so rare.

But the elastic heart of youth cannot be compressed into one constrained shape long at a time.

The source of all humor is not laughter, but sorrow.