“The habit of writing clearly soon comes to the writer who is a severe critic to himself.”

A man’s mind will very gradually refuse to make itself up until it is driven and compelled by emergency.

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.

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

Men are cowards before women until they become tyrants.

Obviously I clearly wouldn’t like that person if I knew ’em better.

If a man proves too clearly and convincingly to himself…that a tiger is an optical illusion–well, he will find out he is wrong.

Be obscure clearly! Be wild of tongue in a way we can understand.

The main thing I try to do is write as clearly as I can. I rewrite a good deal to make it clear.

We need American foreign policy that tells the world very clearly that it is bad to be our enemy and good to be our friend.

To be interested in food but not in food production is clearly absurd.

I had already determined to sell my life as dearly as possible if attacked. I felt if I could take one lyncher with me, this would even up the score a little bit.

I have clearly recorded this: for one can learn good lessons also from what has been tried but clearly has not succeeded, when it is clear why it has not succeeded.