Wild as man was, and disgusting as the more degraded tribes and communities were, the best of them, and all those from which further advance came, were marked by good qualities, or they could never have risen to a higher stage.
No man can instruct more than half-a-dozen students at once. The whole problem of education is one of its cost in money.
The common view of marriage as a primitive institution implies in the man more than arbitrary superiority, such as he exercised over the child, which still remained free. The woman’s slavery was assumed to be for life.
Man loves most that which is his own.
The habit of expression leads to the search for something to express. Something remains as a residuum of the commonplace itself, if one strikes out every commonplace in the expression.
Those who seek education in the paths of duty are always deceived by the illusion that power in the hands of friends is an advantage to them.
Any schoolboy could see that man as a force must be measured by motion, from a fixed point.
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.