In a museum in Havana, there are two skulls of Christopher Columbus, one when he was a boy and one when he was a man

The country is the real thing, the substantial thing, the eternal thing, it is the thing to watch over and care for and be loyal to; institutions are extraneous. . . .

It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either of them.

It is better to support schools than jails.

It's so damned humiliating.

Anybody can have ideas-the difficulty is to express them without squandering a quire of paper on an idea that ought to be reduced to one glittering paragraph.

I should have been glad to acquire some sort of idea of Hindu theology, ... but the difficulties were too great.