Power is poison. Its effect on Presidents had always been tragic, chiefly as an almost insane excitement at first, and a worse reaction afterwards.
A senator is like a begonia – showy but useless.
The new American, like the new European, was the servant of the powerhouse, as the European of the twelfth century was the servant of the Church.
During an election campaign the air is full of speeches and vice versa.
The social side of Washington was to be taken for granted as three-fourths of existence. Politics and reform became the detail, and waltzing the profession.
One could not stay a month without loving the shabby town.
If any one of us has had an ambition higher than that of making money; a motive better than that of expediency; a faith warmer than that of reasoning; a love purer than that of the self; he has been slow to express it; still slower to urge it.
An American Virgin would never dare command; an American Venus would never dare exist.
The work of internal government has become the task of controlling the thousands of fifth-rate men.
I am fairly tired – bored beyond endurance – by the world we live in, and its ideals, and am ready to say so, not violently, but kindly, as one rubs salt into the back of a flogged sailor as though one loved him.
The scientific mind is atrophied, and suffers under inherited cerebral weakness, when it comes in contact with the eternal woman – Astarte, Isis, Demeter, Aphrodite, and the last and greatest deity of all, the Virgin.
If our minds could get hold of one abstract truth, they would be immortal so far as that truth is concerned. My trouble is to find out how we can get hold of the truth at all.
One sought not absolute truth. One sought only a spool on which to wind the thread of history without breaking it.
There are two things that seem to be at the bottom of our constitutions; one is a continual tendency towards politics; the other is family pride; and it is strange how these two feelings run through all of us.
For after all man knows mighty little, and may some day learn enough of his own ignorance to fall down again and pray. Not that Icare. Only, if such is God’s will, and Fate and Evolution – let there be God!
As History stands, it is a sort of Chinese Play, without end and without lesson.
American politics is a struggle, not of men but of forces. The men become every year more and more creatures of force, massed about central power houses.
Of all studies, the one he would rather have avoided was that of his own mind. He knew no tragedy so heartrending as introspection.
Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed. The imagination must be given not wings but weights.
A new friend is always a miracle, but at thirty-three years old, such a bird of paradise rising in the sage-brush was an avatar. One friend in a lifetime is much; two are many; three are hardly.