A pessimist is a well-informed optimist.

The vast majority of the race whether savage or civilized, are secretly kind at heart and shrink from inflicting pain, but in the presence of the aggressive and pitiless minority they don't dare to assert themselves.

It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so.

No man has an appreciation so various that his judgment is good upon all varieties of literary work.

If you hold a cat by the tail you learn things you cannot learn any other way.

Tomorrow night I appear for the first time before a Boston audience - 4000 critics.

There is nothing training cannot do. Nothing is above its reach. It can turn bad morals to good; it can destroy bad principles and recreate good ones; it can lift men to angelship.