Independence-is loyalty to one's best self and principles, and this is often disloyalty to the general idols and fetishes.

I don't give a damn for a man that can only spell a word one way.

The Book of Mormon is chloroform in print

Whatever you have lived, you can write & by hard work & a genuine apprenticeship, you can learn to write well; but what you have not lived you cannot write, you can only pretend to write it.

Our most valuable and most instructive materials in the history of man are treasured up in India.

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.

All human rules are more or less idiotic.