Satirists gain the applause of others through fear, not through love.

He who comes up to his own idea of greatness must always have had a very low standard of it in his mind.

There is no one thoroughly despicable. We cannot descend much lower than an idiot; and an idiot has some advantages over a wise man.

What are the publications that succeed? Those that pretend to teach the public that the persons they have been accustomed unwittingly to look up to as the lights of the earth are no better than themselves.

Fashion is the abortive issue of vain ostentation and exclusive egotism ... tied to no rule, and bound to conform to every whim of the minute.

Old friendships are like meats served up repeatedly, cold, comfortless, and distasteful. The stomach turns against them.

The admiration of power in others is as common to man as the love of it in himself; the one makes him a tyrant, the other a slave.