Imagination labors best in distant fields.

My idea of our civilization is that it is a shoddy, poor thing and full of cruelties, vanities, arrogances, meannesses and hypocrisies.

I would much prefer to suffer from the clean incision of an honest lancet than from a sweetened poison.

I have never heard enough classical music to be able to enjoy it; & the simple truth is, I detest it. Not mildly, but will all my heart. To me an opera is the very climax & cap-stone of the absurd, the fantastic the unjustifiable. I hate the very name of opera - partly because of the nights of suffering I have endured in its presence, & partly because I want to love it and can't.

He was endowed with a stupidity which by the least little stretch would go around the globe four times and tie.

It is better to support schools than jails.

His head was an hour-glass; it could stow an idea, but it had to do it a grain at a time, not the whole idea at once.