To my mind that literature is best and most enduring which is characterized by a noble simplicity.

Evolution is the law of policies: Darwin said it, Socrates endorsed it, Cuvier proved it and established it for all time in his paper on The Survival of the Fittest. These are illustrious names, this is a mighty doctrine: nothing can ever remove it from its firm base, nothing dissolve it, but evolution.

My own luck has been curious all my literary life; I never could tell a lie that anyone would doubt, nor a truth that anybody would believe.

The New York papers have long known that no large question is ever really settled until I have been consulted.

Damn these human beings; if I had invented them I would go hide my head in a bag.

Talking of patriotism, what humbug it is; it is a word which always commemorates a robbery.

An injurious truth has no merit over an injurious lie. Neither should ever be uttered. The man who speaks an injurious truth, lest his soul be not saved if he do otherwise, should reflect that that sort of a soul is not strictly worth saving.