I conceive that the right way to write a story for boys is to write so that it will not only interest boys but strongly interest any man who has ever been a boy. That immensely enlarges the audience.

We could use up two Eternities in learning all that is to be learned about our own world and the thousands of nations that have arisen and flourished and vanished from it. Mathematics alone would occupy me eight million years.

Virtue has never been as respectable as money.

The Indian may seem poor to we rich Westerners but in matters of the spirit it is we who are the paupers and they who are millionaires.

I have a higher and grander standard of principle than George Washington. He could not lie; I can, but I won't.

We despise all reverences and all objects of reverence which are outside the pale of our list of sacred things. And yet, with strange inconsistency, we are shocked when other people despise and defile the things which are holy to us.

Beautiful credit! The foundation of modern society.