It is the will of God that we must have critics, and missionaries, and Congressmen, and humorists, and we must bear the burden. Meantime, I seem to have been drifting into criticism myself. But that is nothing. At the worst, criticism is nothing more than a crime, and I am not unused to that.

Humor, to be comprehensible to anybody, must be built upon a foundation with which he is familiar. If he can't see the foundation the superstructure is to him merely a freak -- like the Flatiron building without any visible means of support -- something that ought to be arrested.

No amount of evidence will ever persuade an idiot

Trial by jury is the palladium of our liberties. I do not know what a palladium is, but I am sure it is a good thing!

I must have a prodigious quantity of mind; it takes me as much as a week sometimes to make it up.

Is a person's public and private opinion the same? It is thought there have been instances.

A man accustomed to American food and American domestic cookery would not starve to death suddenly in Europe, but I think he would gradually waste away, and eventually die.