My own conclusion is that history is simply social development along the lines of weakest resistance, and that in most cases the line of weakest resistance is found as unconsciously by society as by water.
Nothing is easier to teach than historical method, but, when learned, it has little use.
History is the most aristocratic of all literary pursuits, because it obliges the historian to be rich as well as educated.
Friends are born, not made.
As history stands, it is a sort of Chinese play, without end andl without lesson. With these impressions I wrote the last line of my History, asking for a round century before going further.
Young men have a passion for regarding their elders as senile.
The progress of evolution from President Washington to President Grant was alone evidence to upset Darwin.
Simplicity is the most deceitful mistress that ever betrayed man.
Politics, as a practise, whatever its professions, has always been the systematic organization of hatreds.
Practical politics consists in ignoring facts.
At best, the renewal of broken relations is a nervous matter.
Absolute liberty is absence of restraint; responsibility is restraint; therefore, the ideally free individual is responsible to himself.
I am an anarchist in politics and an impressionist in art as well as a symbolist in literature. Not that I understand what these terms mean, but I take them to be all merely synonyms of pessimist.
Some day science may have the existence of mankind in power, and the human race can commit suicide by blowing up the world.
American society is a sort of flat, fresh-water pond which absorbs silently, without reaction, anything which is thrown into it.
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.
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.
Only on the edge of the grave can man conclude anything.
No man, however strong, can serve ten years as schoolmaster, priest, or Senator, and remain fit for anything else.
No man means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous.