“For most people reform meant relief from ecclesiastical extortions.”

When people don’t have an objective, there’s much less dynamic effort, and that makes life a lot less interesting.

Strong prejudices in an ill-formed mind are hazardous to government, and when combined with a position of power even more so.

Every successful revolution puts on in time the robes of the tyrant it has deposed.

The whole vast challenge of a continent waiting to be exploited, combined to produce a prevailing materialism and an American drive bent as much, if not more, on money, property, and power than was true of the Old World from which we had fled.

To put away one’s own original thoughts in order to take up a book is a sin against the Holy Ghost.

Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill.

No female iniquity was more severely condemned than the habit of plucking eyebrows and the hairline to heighten the forehead.

I have always been in a condition in which I cannot not write.

Doctrine tied itself into infinite knots over the realities of sex.

Of all the ills that our poor … society is heir to, the focal one, it seems to me, from which so much of our uneasiness and confusion derive, is the absence of standards.

Human beings, like plans, prove fallible in the presence of those ingredients that are missing in maneuvers – danger, death, and live ammunition.

Without books, the development of civilization would have been impossible.

Historians who stuff in every item of research they have found, every shoelace and telephone call of a biographical subject, are not doing the hard work of selecting and shaping a readable story.

Nothing is more satisfying than to write a good sentence.

Modern historians have suggested that in his last years he (Richard II) was overtaken by mental disease, but that is only a modern view of the malfunction common to 14th century rulers: inability to inhibit impulse.

In the midst of events there is no perspective.

I certainly want campaign finance reform. I just wish this would do it in a way that would stand up to a constitutional challenge.

None more deceive themselves than they who think their religion is true and genuine, thought it refines not their spirits and reforms not their lives.

What were once felt to be defects-isolation, institutional simplicity, primitiveness of manners, multiplicity of religions, weaknesses in the authority of the state-could now be seen as virtues.

I welcome the President and working with him to try to get some of that medical malpractice reform so we can get the cost of health care to come down.

Look, all this is about is utilizing the rules of the Senate, using a majority of the senators, to make sure that we get health reform done. We cannot wait another day.

Reforms are slow, but they never go backward.

The problem with the West is that they start with political reform going towards democracy.

On the most recent battles on health insurance reform, the women led the battle to end gender discrimination by the insurance companies [where] women paid more and got less of a benefit, and also the whole issue of prevention.