Power is poison. Its effect on Presidents had always been tragic, chiefly as an almost insane excitement at first, and a worse reaction afterwards.
The Jewish question is really the most serious of our problems.
The proof that a philosopher does not know what he is talking about is apt to sadden his followers before it reacts on himself.
Boys naturally look on all force as an enemy.
As a historian, he felt it his duty to respect everything that had ever been respected, except for the occasional statesman.
You can’t use tact with a Congressman! A Congressman is a hog! You must take a stick and hit him on the snout!
Politics are a very unsatisfactory game.
Church and State, Soul and Body, God and Man, are all one at Mont Saint Michel, and the business of all is to fight, each in his own way, or to stand guard for each other.
The mind resorts to reason for want of training.
History is a tangled skein that one may take up at any point, and break when one has unravelled enough.
Mathematicians practice absolute freedom.
By nature, man is lazy, working only under compulsion; and when he is strong we will always live, as far as he can, upon the labor or the property of the weak.
Every one must bear his own universe, and most persons are moderately interested in learning how their neighbors have managed to carry theirs.
The woman who is known only through a man is known wrong.
The proper study of mankind is woman.
In the one branch he most needed.
Women have, commonly, a very positive moral sense; that which they will, is right; that which they reject, is wrong; and their will, in most cases, ends by settling the moral.
I would rather starve and rot and keep the privilege of speaking the truth as I see it, than of holding all the offices that capital has to give from the presidency down.
The tourist was the great conservative who hated novelty and adored dirt.
A boy’s will is his life, and he dies when it is broken, as the colt dies in harness, taking a new nature in becoming tame.
If I grapple with sin in my own strength, the devil knows he may go to sleep.