When you’ve told someone that you’ve left them a legacy the only decent thing to do is to die at once.
A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.
Short words are the best and old words when short are best of all.
Whoever wishes to attain an English style, familiar but not coarse, and elegant but not ostentatious, must give his days and nights to the volumes of Addison.
There is a certain satisfaction in coming down to the lowest ground of politics, for we get rid of cant and hypocrisy.
I’m taking more time to listen to myself. It’s allowed me to be an aggressive bad ass, calling it as I see it
Events can neither be regarded as a series of adventures nor strung on the thread of a preconceived moral. They must obey their own laws.
Life cannot subsist in society but by reciprocal concessions.
The squirrel that you kill in jest, dies in earnest.
The dead should be judged like criminals, impartially, but they should be allowed the benefit of the doubt.
Quarrel? Nonsense; we have not quarreled. If one is not to get into a rage sometimes, what is the good of being friends?
Perhaps the greatest social service that can be rendered by anybody to the country and to mankind is to bring up a family.
It was high counsel that I once heard given to a young person, ‘always do what you are afraid to do.’
You can never really live anyone else’s life, not even your child’s. The influence you exert is through your own life, and what you’ve become yourself.
There is no distinctly American criminal class – except Congress.
Cities give us collision. ‘Tis said, London and New York take the nonsense out of a man.
A genius can never expect to have a good time anywhere, if he is a genuine article, but America is about the last place in which life will be endurable at all for an inspired writer of any kind.
Murder in the murderer is no such ruinous thought as poets and romancers will have it; it does not unsettle him, or fright him from his ordinary notice of trifles; it is an act quite easy to be contemplated.
The world will only, in the end, follow those who have despised as well as served it.
Every man is an impossibility until he is born.
Justice cannot be for one side alone, but must be for both.
