Venice is the worlds unconscious: a misers glittering hoard, guarded by a Beast whose eyes are made of white agate, and by a saint who is really a prince who has just slain a dragon.

most people did not care to be taught what they did not already know; it made them feel ignorant.

We are a nation of 20 million bathrooms, with a humanist in every tub.

... in America ... children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.

I was going to get myself recognized at any price. If I could not win fame by goodness, I was ready to do it by badness.

Anti-Semitism is a horrible disease from which nobody is immune, and it has a kind of evil fascination that makes an enlightened person draw near the source of infection, supposedly in a scientific spirit, but really to sniff the vapors and dally with the possibility.

Our language, once homely and colloquial, seeks to aggrandize our meanest activities with polysyllabic terms or it retreats from frankness into a stammering verbosity.