I would rather go to bed with Lillian Russell stark naked than Ulysses S Grant in full military regalia.

Damn the subjunctive. It brings all our writers to shame.

When everyone is looking for gold, it's a good time to be in the pick and shovel business.

The history of our race, and each individual’s experience, are sown thick with evidence that a truth is not hard to kill and that a lie told well is immortal.

Irreverence is the champion of liberty and its only sure defense.

Every civilization carries the seeds of its own destruction, and the same cycle shows in them all. The Republic is born, flourishes, decays into plutocracy, and is captured by the shoemaker whom the mercenaries and millionaires make into a king. The people invent their oppressors, and the oppressors serve the function for which they are invented.

O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain.