“Men are cowards before women until they become tyrants.”

Above all else, never think you’re not good enough.

The true picture of life as it is, if it could be adequately painted, would show men what they are, and how they might rise, not, indeed to perfection, but one step first, and then another on the ladder.

Make all men equal to-day, and God has so created them that they shall be all unequal to-morrow.

Neither money nor position can atone to me for low birth.

When a man is ill nothing is so important to him as his own illness.

It has become a certainty now that if you will only advertise sufficiently you may make a fortune by selling anything.

Passionate love, I take it, rarely lasts long, and is very troublesome while it does last. Mutual esteem is very much more valuable.

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.

Florida sends me a handicap sticker when I’m there. It’s embarrassing. But I can’t walk more than six holes before the whole knee swells up, and then I can’t go anymore.

Before all else, be armed.

Now, as never before, the old phrase has a literal meaning: we are all in the same boat.

You think dogs will not be in heaven? I tell you, they will be there long before any of us.

[Before being burned at the stake for her faith:] Hold the cross high so I may see it through the flames.

That past which is so presumptuously brought forward as a precedent for the present, was itself founded on some past that went before it.

I’m a child of God first. Before I became a celebrity, I was baptized a Christian.

I started selling out comedy clubs before I got to town with no advertising. I was selling out theaters just on the rumor that I was going to be there.