Genius and virtue are to be more often found clothed in gray than in peacock bright.

Nothing is so soothing to our self-esteem as to find our bad traits in our forebears. It seems to absolve us.

Longfellow is to poetry what the barrel-organ is to music.

The instructed man is ashamed to pronounce in an Orphic manner what everybody knows, and because he is silent people think he is making fun of them.

Once you have a point of view all history will back you up.

The American mind, unlike the English, is not formed by books, but, as Carl Sandburg once said to me, by newspapers and the Bible.

People of small calibre are always carping. How affected so-and-so is! Don't you think he is silly? He was certainly quite mistaken about this or that. They are bent on showing their own superiority, their knowledge or their prowess or good breeding.