Words are alive. Cut them and they bleed.

The lessons of science should be experimental also. The sight of a planet through a telescope is worth all the course on astronomy; the shock of the electric spark in the elbow outvalues all theories; the taste of the nitrous oxide, the firing of an artificial volcano, are better than volumes of chemistry.

Life is short but there is always time for courtesy.

The best university that can be recommended to a man of ideas is the gauntlet of the mob.

Conservatism, ever more timorous and narrow, disgusts the children, and drives them for a mouthful of fresh air into radicalism.

The true test of civilization is not the census, nor the size of cities, nor the crops - no, but the kind of man the country turns out.

Time is indeed the theater and seat of illusions; nothing is so ductile and elastic. The mind stretches an hour to a century, and dwarfs an age to an hour.