Every one who marries goes it blind, more or less.
One does every day and without a second thought, what at another time would be the event of a year, perhaps of a life.
The best date movies give you something to talk about. A movie that’s a downer is a great way to find out about someone.
Even theologians, even the great theologians of the thirteenth century, even Saint Thomas Aquinas himself did not trust to faith alone, or assume the existence of God.
Modern politics is, at bottom, a struggle not of men but of forces.
That the American, by temperament, worked to excess, was true; work and whiskey were his stimulants; work was a form of vice; but he never cared much for money or power after he earned them.
Although the Senate is much given to admiring in its members a superiority less obvious or quite invisible to outsiders, one Senator seldom proclaims his own inferiority to another, and still more seldom likes to be told of it.
All State education is a sort of dynamo machine for polarizing the popular mind; for turning and holding its lines of force in the direction supposed to be most effective for State purposes.
For reasons which many persons thought ridiculous, Mrs. Lightfoot Lee decided to pass the winter in Washington.
Analogies are figures intended to serve as fatal weapons if they succeed, and as innocent toys if they fail.
My favorite figure of the American author is that of a man who breeds a favorite dog, which he throws into the Mississippi River for the pleasure of making a splash. The river does not splash, but it drowns the dog.
The American man is a very simple and cheap mechanism. The American woman I find a complicated and expensive one. Contrasts of feminine types are possible. I am not absolutely sure that there is more than one American man.
I want to be advertised and the easiest way is to do something obnoxious and do it well.
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.