The convention missionaries call "modesty" has no standard, and cannot have one, because it is opposed to nature and reason and is therefore an artificiality and subject to anybody's whim - anybody's diseased caprice.

No man, deep down in the privacy of his heart, has any considerable respect for himself.

Names are not always what they seem.

A good legible label is usually worth, for information, a ton of significant attitude and expression in a historical picture.

A monarch, when good, is entitled to the consideration which we accord to a pirate who keeps Sunday School between crimes; when bad, he is entitled to none at all.

Often a quite assified remark becomes sanctified by use and petrified by custom; it is then a permanency, its term of activity a geologic period.

Intellectual food is like any other; it is pleasanter and more beneficial to take it with a spoon than a shovel.