As one reads history, not in the expurgated editions written for schoolboys and passmen, but in the original authorities of each time, one is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed, but by the punishments that the good have inflicted; and a community is infinitely more brutalised by the habitual employment of punishment than it is by the occasional occurrence of crime.

The reason we are so pleased to find other people's secrets is that it distracts public attention from our own.

Man is a rational animal who always loses his temper when he is called upon to act in accordance with the dictates of reason.

There is no country in the world where machinery is so lovely as in America.

If a man needs an elaborate tombstone in order to remain in the memory of his country, it is clear that his living at all was an act of absolute superfluity.

Don't tell me that you have exhausted Life. When a man says that, one knows that life has exhausted him.

I like persons better than principles, and I like persons with no principles better than anything else in the world.