A joke is a joke or the image of a truth.

Speaking the truth, once you have started it, is too exhilarating to draw back.

A nation has honor precisely as it has fleas - on this or that body. The statesman who talks of honor - unless he means something else, quite different - is a rogue.

No one asks public men to be strictly moral, but they must seem to be well-behaved.

The older I grow the more sharply I mistrust words. So few of them have any meaning left. It is impossible to write one sentence in which every word has the bareness and hardness of bones, the reality of the skeleton.

jealousy, the most hideous emotion any human being ever suffers, has nothing to do with the mind. Or not at first.

Writers sometimes talk as though they were the only friends of civilization. This is their conceit. But they have special powers to serve -- or to corrupt -- civilization, and are obliged to use them.