Friendship needs to be rooted in respect, but love can live upon itself alone

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

Excess always carries it's own retributions.

Genius scorns the power of gold: it is wrong. Gold is the war-scythe on its chariot, which mows down the millions of its foes, and gives free passage to the sun-coursers with which it leaves those heavenly fields of light for the gross battlefields of earth.

There is nothing that you may not get people to believe in if you will only tell it them loud enough and often enough, till the welkin rings with it.

I have known men who have been sold and bought a hundred times, who have only got very fat and very comfortable in the process of exchange.