“Innovations to which we are not committed are illuminating things.”

to be civilized is to be incapable of giving unnecessary offense, it is to have some quality of consideration for all who cross our path.

Believers in political faith-healing enjoy a supreme immunity from doubt.

The diseases of the present have little in common with the diseases of the past save that we die of them.

Humor distorts nothing, and only false gods are laughed off their earthly pedestals.

It is in his pleasure that a man really lives.

fair play is less characteristic of groups than of individuals.

History is, and has always been trameled by facts. It may ignore some and deny others; but it cannot accommodate itself unreservedly to theories; it cannot be stripped of things evidenced in favor of things surmised.

There is a vast deal of make-believe in the carefully nurtured sentiment for country life, and the barefoot boy, and the mountain girl.

The perfectly natural thing to do with an unreadable book is to give it away; and the publication, for more than a quarter of a century, of volumes which fulfilled this one purpose and no other is a pleasant proof, if proof were needed, of the business principles which underlay the enlightened activity of publishers.

Those persons are happiest in this restless and mutable world who are in love with change, who delight in what is new simply because it differs from what is old; who rejoice in every innovation, and find a strange alert pleasure in all that is, and that has never been before.

There are few nudities so objectionable as the naked truth.

There is a secret and wholesome conviction in the heart of every man or woman who has written a book that it should be no easy matter for an intelligent reader to lay down that book unfinished. There is a pardonable impression among reviewers that half an hour in its company is sufficient.

The comfortable thing about the study of history is that it inclines us to think hopefully of our own times.

We may fail of our happiness, strive we ever so bravely; but we are less likely to fail if we measure with judgement our chances and our capabilities.

Books that children read but once are of scant service to them; those that have really helped to warm our imaginations and to train our faculties are the few old friends we know so well that they have become a portion of our thinking selves.

The earliest voice listened to by the nations in their infancy was the voice of the storyteller.

The Hutterians, to cite an extreme example, are today still strongly committed to communal living after practicing it, punctuated only by occasional lapses into private enterprise, for 450 years.

I think it is! I don’t feel overworked. I get a constant kick out of being heavily committed. Is that sick or something? God, what would I do sitting still?

No one will find me to have knowingly committed fraud.

I want to see young people who as committed to the cause of Jesus Christ as their young people are to the cause of Islam.

I listened, vaguely knowing now that I had committed some awful wrong that I could not undo, that I had uttered words I could not recall even though I ached to nullify them.

In the last analysis, the welfare of the workers depends upon their own initiative. Whatever is done under the guise of philanthropy or social morality which in any way lessens initiative is the greatest crime that can be committed against the toilers.

How like herrings and onions our vices are in the morning after we have committed them.

My husband is so cheap. On Christmas Eve, he fires one shot and tells the kids Santa committed suicide.