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

There's always something about your success that displeases even your best friends.

What a lie it is to call this a free country, where none but the unworthy and undeserving may swear.

That is the way we are made: we don't reason, where we feel; we just feel.

Peace by persuasion has a pleasant sound, but I think we should not be able to work it. We should have to tame the human race first, and history seems to show that that cannot be done.

Man seems to be a rickety poor sort of thing, any way you take him; a kind of British Museum of infirmities and inferiorities. He is always undergoing repairs. A machine that was as unreliable as he is would have no market.

When the world is made to be idiot-proof, the world will become overpopulated with idiots.