To get the right word in the right place is a rare achievement. To condense the diffused light of a page of thought into the luminous flash of a single sentence, is worthy to rank as a prize composition just by itself...Anybody can have ideas--the difficulty is to express them without squandering a quire of paper on an idea that ought to be reduced to one glittering paragraph.

I would rather go to bed with Lillian Russell stark naked than Ulysses S Grant in full military regalia.

Good breeding consists in concealing how much we think of ourselves and how little we think of the other person.

It's easy to make friends, but hard to get rid of them.

It's easy to endure adversity -- if it happens to someone else.

There was no place in the land where the seeker could not find some small budding sign of pity for the slave. No place in all the land but one - the pulpit. It yielded last; it always does. It fought a strong and stubborn fight, and then did what it always does, joined the procession - at the tail end. Slavery fell. The slavery texts in the Bible remained; the practice changed; that was all.

To be great, truly great, you have to be the kind of person who makes the others around you great.