It is a gratification to me to know that I am ignorant of art... Because people who understand art find nothing in pictures but blemishes.

I can live for two months on a good compliment.

Strip the human race, absolutely naked, and it would be a real democracy. But the introduction of even a rag of tiger skin, or a cowtail, could make a badge of distinction and be the beginning of a monarchy.

Nevertheless we have this curious spectacle: daily the trained parrot in the pulpit gravely delivers himself of these ironies, which he has acquired at second-hand and adopted without examination, to a trained congregation which accepts them without examination, and neither the speaker nor the hearer laughs at himself. It does seem as if we ought to be humble when we are at a bench-show, and not put on airs of intellectual superiority there.

Familiarity breeds contempt - and children.

When congress is in session no American is safe.

When the end of the world comes, I want to be in Kentucky, because everything there happens 20 years after it happens anywhere else.