Crowds stand around all day long and criticise that bridge, and find fault with it, and tell with unlimited frankness how it ought to have been planned, and how they would have built it had the city granted them the $14,000 it cost. It is really refreshing to hang around these and listen to them. A foreigner would come to the conclusion that all America was composed of inspired professional bridge builders.

The soul and substance of what customarily ranks as patriotism is moral cowardice -- and always has been.

Why is it that we rejoice at a birth and grieve at a funeral? It is because we are not the person involved.

There is no character, howsoever good and fine, but it can be destroyed by ridicule, howsoever poor and witless.

The only people who should use the possessive 'we' are kings, newspaper editors, and persons with tapeworms.

There was no place in the land where the seeker could not find some small budding sign of pity for the slave. No place in all the land but one - the pulpit. It yielded last; it always does. It fought a strong and stubborn fight, and then did what it always does, joined the procession - at the tail end. Slavery fell. The slavery texts in the Bible remained; the practice changed; that was all.

Your friends may love you in private but your enemies will hate you in public.