If we learned to walk and talk the way we learn to read and write, everyone would limp and stutter.
What a world of trouble those who never marry escape! There are many happy matches, it is true, and sometimes “my dear,” and “my love” come from the heart; but what sensible bachelor, rejoicing in his freedom and years of discretion, will run the tremendous risk?
Men and women – even man and wife are foreigners. Each has reserves that the other cannot enter into, nor understand. These have the effect of frontiers.
Marriage – yes, it is the supreme felicity of life. I concede it. And it is also the supreme tragedy of life. The deeper the love the surer the tragedy. And the more disconsolating when it comes.
Patriotism is usually the refuge of the scoundrel. He is the man who talks the loudest.
The soul and substance of what customarily ranks as patriotism is moral cowardice – and always has been.
The new political gospel: public office is private graft.
When politics enter into municipal government, nothing resulting therefrom in the way of crimes and infamies is then incredible. It actually enables one to accept and believe the impossible...
I was an arden Hayes man, but that was natural, for I was pretty young at the time, I have since convinced myself that the political opinioins of a nation are of next to no value, in any case, but that what little rag of value they posess is to be found among the old, rather than among the young.
Where every man in a state has a vote, brutal laws are impossible.
We are always too busy for our children; we never give them the time or interest they deserve. We lavish gifts upon them; but the most precious gift, our personal association, which means so much to them, we give grudgingly.
Alas! those good old days are gone, when a murderer could wipe the stain from his name and soothe his trouble to sleep simply by getting out his blocks and mortar and building an addition to a church.
My land, the power of training! Of influence! Of education! It can bring a body up to believe anything.
We were good boys, good Presbyterian boys, and loyal and all that; anyway, we were good Presbyterian boys when the weather was doubtful; when it was fair, we did wander a little from the fold.
I do not know what we should do without the pulpit. We could better spare the sun-the moon, anyway.
We don’t cut up when mad men are bred by the old legitimate regular stock religions, but we can’t allow wildcat religions to indulge in such disastrous experiments.
The Koran does not permit Mohammedans to drink. Their natural instincts do not permit them to be moral. They say the Sultan has eight hundred wives. This almost amounts to bigamy.
Apparently one of the most uncertain things in the world is the funeral of a religion.
It is a time when one’s spirit is subdued and sad, one knows not why; when the past seems a storm-swept desolation, life a vanity and a burden, and the future but a way to death.
The Creator made Italy from designs by Michelangelo.