The American struggle for the vote was much more difficult than the English for the simple reason that it was much more easy.

The [nineteenth-century] young men who were Puritans in politics were anti-Puritans in literature. They were willing to die for the independence of Poland or the Manchester Fenians; and they relaxed their tension by voluptuous reading in Swinburne.

Woman too commonly commits the sin of self-sacrifice whereby she consents to be sequestered in the home, without intellectual stimulus, so that the tranquil flame of her unspoiled soul should radiate purity and nobility upon an indefinitely extended family.

Man is a hating rather than a loving animal.

The Portrait of a Lady is entirely successful in giving one the sense of having met somebody far too radiantly good for this world.

Babbitt as a book was planless; its end arrived apparently because its author had come to the end of the writing-pad, or rather, one might suspect from its length, to the end of all writing-pads then on the market.

every human activity, whether it be love, philosophy, art, or revolution, is carried on with a special intensity in Paris.