The value the world sets upon motives is often grossly unjust and inaccurate.
The plain people, hereafter as in the past, will continue to make their own language, and the best that grammarians can do is to follow after it, haltingly, and not often with much insight into it.
No man ever quite believes in any other man.
It is only doubt that creates. It is only the minority that counts.
Poverty is a soft pedal upon the branches of human activity, not excepting the spiritual.
The truth, indeed, is something that mankind, for some mysterious reason, instinctively dislikes. Every man who tries to tell it is unpopular, and even when, by the sheer strength of his case, he prevails, he is put down as a scoundrel.
I believe in only one thing and that thing is human liberty.
If ever a man is to achieve anything like dignity, it can happen only if superior men are given absolute freedom to think what they want to think and say what they want to say.
Government, like any other organism, refuses to acquiesce in its own extinction. This refusal, of course, involves the resistance to any effort to diminish its powers and prerogatives.
School teachers, taking them by and large, are probably the most ignorant and stupid class of men in the whole group of mental workers.
A bad artist almost always tries to conceal his incompetence by whooping up a new formula.
No one ever heard of the truth being enforced by law. When the secular is called in to sustain an idea, whether new or old, it is always a bad idea, and not infrequently it is downright idiotic.
An altruist is one who would be sincerely sorry to see his neighbor’s children devoured by wolves.
Citizenship in New York is now worth no more than citizenship in Arkansas, for it is open to any applicant from the marshes of Bessarabia, and, still worse, to any applicant from Arkansas.
The pedant and the priest have always been the most expert of logicians – and the most diligent disseminators of nonsense and worse.
The best years are the forties; after fifty a man begins to deteriorate, but in the forties he is at the maximum of his villainy.
It seems to me that a great university ought to have room in it for men subscribing to every sort of idea that is currently prevalent.
Shave a gorilla and it would be almost impossible, at twenty paces, to distinguish him from a heavyweight champion of the world. Skin a chimpanzee, and it would take an autopsy to prove he was not a theologian.
All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men who have whooped them up and tried to enforce them.
All successful newpapers are ceaselessly querulous and bellicose. They never defend anyone or anything if they can help it; if the job is forced upon them, they tackle it by denouncing someone or something else.