No man, deep down in the privacy of his heart, has any considerable respect for himself.

The average American may not know who his grandfather was. But the American was, however, one degree better off than the average Frenchman who, as a rule, was in considerable doubt as to who his father was.

Why do you sit there looking like an envelope without any address on it?

A discriminating irreverence is the creator and protector of human liberty.

The inability to forget is far more devastating than the inability to remember.

In my schoolboy days I had no aversion to slavery. I was not aware there was anything wrong about it. No-one arraigned it in my hearing; the local papers said nothing against it; the local pulpit taught us that God approved it, that it was a holy thing, and that the doubter need only look in the Bible if he wished to settle his mind.

It is more trouble to make a maxim than it is to do right.