To avoid lying, do nothing that needs covering.

The Mississippi River will always have its own way; no engineering skill can persuade it to do otherwise.

Politicians, old buildings, and prostitutes become respectable with age.

I speak French with timidity, and not flowingly--except when excited. When using that language I have often noticed that I have hardly ever been mistaken for a Frenchman, except, perhaps, by horses; never, I believe, by people.

We don't care to eat toadstools that think they are truffles.

I should be sorry to think it was the publishers themselves they got up this entire little flutter to enable them to unload a book that was taking too much room in their cellars, but you can never tell what a publisher will do. I have been one myself.

Christianity will doubtless still survive in the earth ten centuries hence- stuffed and in a museum.