Power is sweet, and when you are a little clerk you love its sweetness quite as much as if you were an emperor, and maybe you love it a good deal more.

The scorn of genius is the most arrogant and the most boundless of all scorn.

The loss of our illusions is the only loss from which we never recover.

Honor is an old-world thing; but it smells sweet to those in whose hand it is strong.

[On Christianity:] Its lip-service and its empty rites have made it the easiest of all tasks for the usurer to cloak his cruelties, the miser to hide his avarice, the lawyer to condone his lies, the sinner of all social sins to purchase the social immunity from them by outward deference to churches.

The joy of a strong nature is as cloudless as its suffering is desolate.

The radical defect in Christianity is that it tried to win the world by a bribe, and it has become a nullity.