Some day science may have the existence of mankind in power, and the human race can commit suicide by blowing up the world.Collection: Power
Politics, as a practise, whatever its professions, has always been the systematic organization of hatreds.Collection: Politics
Everyone carries his own inch rule of taste, and amuses himself by applying it, triumphantly, wherever he travels.Collection: Travel
The press is the hired agent of a monied system, and set up for no other purpose than to tell lies where their interests are involved. One can trust nobody and nothing.Collection: Trust
The progress of evolution from President Washington to President Grant was alone evidence to upset Darwin.Collection: Alone
All experience is an arch, to build upon.Collection: Experience
No man likes to have his intelligence or good faith questioned, especially if he has doubts about it himself.Collection: Intelligence
The Indian Summer of life should be a little sunny and a little sad, like the season, and infinite in wealth and depth of tone, but never hustled.Collection: Sad
I have written too much history to have faith in it; and if anyone thinks I'm wrong, I am inclined to agree with him.Collection: History
No man should be in politics unless he would honestly rather not be there.Collection: Politics
Power is poison. Its effect on Presidents had always been tragic.Collection: Power
Chaos was the law of nature; Order was the dream of man.Collection: Nature
Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts.Collection: Science
Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit.Collection: History
Politics are a very unsatisfactory game.Collection: Politics
Practical politics consists in ignoring facts.Collection: Politics
The effect of power and publicity on all men is the aggravation of self, a sort of tumor that ends by killing the victim's sympathies.Collection: Sympathy
It is impossible to underrate human intelligence - beginning with one's own.Collection: Intelligence
Friends are born, not made.Collection: Friendship
A friend in power is a friend lost.Collection: Friendship
One friend in a lifetime is much, two are many, three are hardly possible. Friendship needs a certain parallelism of life, a community of thought, a rivalry of aim.Collection: Friendship
There is no such thing as an underestimate of average intelligence.Collection: Intelligence
He too serves a certain purpose who only stands and cheers.Collection: Politics
Accident counts for as much in companionship as in marriage.Collection: Marriage
A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.Collection: Teacher
No one means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous.
Absolute liberty is absence of restraint; responsibility is restraint; therefore, the ideally free individual is responsible to himself.
The American President resembles the commander of a ship at sea. He must have a helm to grasp, a course to steer, a port to seek.
No man means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous.
The difference is slight, to the influence of an author, whether he is read by five hundred readers, or by five hundred thousand; if he can select the five hundred, he reaches the five hundred thousand.
American society is a sort of flat, fresh-water pond which absorbs silently, without reaction, anything which is thrown into it.
No man, however strong, can serve ten years as schoolmaster, priest, or Senator, and remain fit for anything else.
I tell you the solemn truth, that the doctrine of the Trinity is not so difficult to accept for a working proposition as any one of the axioms of physics.
Thank God, I never was cheerful. I come from the happy stock of the Mathers, who, as you remember, passed sweet mornings reflecting on the goodness of God and the damnation of infants.