Society is infected with rude, cynical, restless, and frivolous persons who prey upon the rest, and whom no public opinion concentrated into good manners, forms accepted by the sense of all, can reach; the contradictors and railers at public and private tables, who are like terriers, who conceive it the duty of a dog of honor to growl at any passer-by, and do the honors of the house by barking him out of sight.

Give a boy address and accomplishments and you give him the mastery of palaces and fortunes where he goes.

Men such as they are, very naturally seek money or power; and power because it is as good as money.

Every day, a little sadder, a little madder. Will someone get me a ladder?

The men who carry their points do not need to inquire of their constituents what they should say, but are themselves the country which they represent: nowhere are its emotions or opinions so instant and so true as in them; nowhere so pure from a selfish infusion.

God screens us evermore from premature ideas.

I shun father and mother and wife and brother, when my genius calls me.