A jackass has that kind of strength, and puts it to a useful purpose, and is valuable to the world because he is a jackass; but anobleman is not valuable because he is a jackass. It is a mixture that is always ineffectual, and should never have been attempted in the first place. And yet, once you start a mistake, the trouble is done and you never know what is going to come of it.

Are you so unobservant as not to have found out that sanity and happiness are an impossible combination?

Life does not consist mainly - or even largely - of facts and happenings.

Such is luck! And such the treatment which honest, good perservance gets so often at the hands of unfair and malicious Nature!

Patriotism is usually the refuge of the scoundrel. He is the man who talks the loudest.

No God and no religion can survive ridicule. No political church, no nobility, no royalty or other fraud, can face ridicule in a fair field, and live.

The easy confidence with which I know another man's religion is folly teaches me to suspect that my own is also.