“If any such point out to us our follies, we at once claim those follies as the special evidence of our wisdom.”

After money in the bank, a grudge is the next best thing.

The mind of the thinker and the student is driven to admit, though it be awe-struck by apparent injustice, that this inequality is the work of God.

I run great risk of failing. It may be that I shall encounter ruin where I look for reputation and a career of honor.

Of all the needs a book has the chief need is that it be readable.

Travel with the same woman in a railway car for twelve hours, and you will have written her down in your own mind in quite other language than that of love.

I have sometimes thought that there is no being so venomous, so bloodthirsty as a professed philanthropist.

Taken altogether, Washington as a city is most unsatisfactory, and falls more grievously short of the thing attempted than any other of the great undertakings of which I have seen anything in the United States.

No man thinks there is much ado about nothing when the ado is about himself.

What man thinks of changing himself so as to suit his wife? And yet men expect that women shall put on altogether new characters when they are married, and girls think that they can do so.

The happiest man is he, who being above the troubles which money brings, has his hands the fullest of work.

A man who would tell me that I am pretty, unless he is over seventy, ought to be kicked out of the room. But a man who can’t show me that he thinks me so without saying a word about it, is a lout.

There is no happiness in love, except at the end of an English novel.

In these days a man is nobody unless his biography is kept so far posted up that it may be ready for the national breakfast-table on the morning after his demise.

Men are cowards before women until they become tyrants.

Beware of creating tedium!

The circumstances seemed to be simple; but they who understood such matters declared that the duration of a trial depended a great deal more on the public interest felt in the matter than upon its own nature.

I have written, probably, more books for children than any other writer, from story-books to plays, and can claim to know more about interesting children than most.

To claim power over what you do not understand is not wise, nor is the end of it likely to be good.

Freedom is not something that one people can bestow on another as a gift. Thy claim it as their own and none can keep it from them.

Blest be the art that can immortalize,–the art that baffles time’s tyrannic claim to quench it.

The white man arrogated to himself the right to rule and to be obeyed by the non-white; his mission, he claimed, was to “civilize” Africa. Under this cloak, the Europeans robbed the continent of vast riches and inflicted unimaginable suffering on the African people.

The way, and the only way, to stop this evil is for all the red men to unite in claiming a common and equal right in the land, as it was at first, and should be yet; for it was never divided, but belongs to all for the use of each.

But when modern absolutism arose, it laid claim to everything on behalf of the sovereign power….

The way, the only way to stop this evil is for the red man to unite in claiming a common and equal right in the land, as it was first, and should be now, for it was never divided.”