It usually takes me more than three weeks to prepare a good impromptu speech.

It now seems plain to me that that theory ought to be vacated in favor of a new and truer one...the Descent of Man from the Higher Animals.

Reputation is a hall-mark: it can remove doubt from pure silver, and it can also make the plated article pass for pure.

Praise is well, compliment is well, but affection-that is the last and most precious reward that any man can win, whether by character or achievement.

The Church worked hard at it night and day during nine centuries and imprisoned, tortured, hanged, and burned whole hordes and armies of witches, and washed the Christian world clean with their foul blood. Then it was discovered that there was no such thing as witches, and never had been. One doesn't know whether to laugh or to cry. Who discovered that there was no such thing as a witch - the priest, the parson? No, these never discover anything.

Often a quite assified remark becomes sanctified by use and petrified by custom; it is then a permanency, its term of activity a geologic period.

No sinner is ever saved after the first twenty minutes of a sermon.