“Unhappy women are given to protecting their sensitiveness by cynical gossip, by whining, by high-church and new-thought religions, or by a fog of vagueness.”

We’re tired of hearing politicians and priests and cautious reformers… coax us, ‘Be calm! Be patient! Wait!

Is it possible that nobody has ever known that there never has been a completely civilized man, and won’t be for another thousand years?

My objection to the church isn’t that the preachers are cruel, hypocritical, actually wicked, though some of them are that, too .

We’d get sick on too many cookies, but ever so much sicker on no cookies at all.

The world and all its wisdom is but a booby, blundering school-boy that needs management and could be managed.

Why is it that traveling Americans are always so dreadful?

To be ‘intellectual’ or ‘artistic’ or, in their own word, to be ‘highbrow,’ is to be priggish and of dubious virtue.

A man takes a drink, the drink takes another, and the drink takes the man.

Most of us who work — or want to work — will always have trouble or discontent. So we must learn to be calm, and train all our faculties, and make others happy.

My chief objection is that 99% of sermons and Sunday School teachings are so agonizingly dull.

To a true-blue professor of literature in an American university, literature is not something that a plain human being, living today, painfully sits down to produce. No; it is something dead.

Writers have a rare power not given to anyone else: we can bore people long after we are dead.

Vast is the power of cities to reclaim the wanderer.

The greatest mystery about a human being is not his reaction to sex or praise, but the manner in which he contrives to put in twenty-four hours a day. It is this which puzzles the longshoreman about the clerk, the Londoner about the bushman.

But the men of ritual and the men of barbarism are capable of shutting up the men of science and silencing them forever.

If travel were so inspiring and informing a business … then the wisest men in the world would be deck hands on tramp steamers.

Health is the most critical thing in our life. With your health anything is possible, without it you can’t do anything.

Usually, critical words are accompanied by threats, name-calling, and yelling. This verbal abuse can be especially damaging.

Intelligence is a critical thing.

When you’re making a critical decision, you have to understand how it’s going to be interpreted from all points of view. Not just your point of view, not just the person you’re talking to, but the people that aren’t in the room. Everybody else.

Rumor gets printed as fact. We may have lost our critical facility as a nation.

As one grows older one becomes more critical of oneself and less of other people.

There are few things more dangerous than inbred religious certainty.

The press is critical at this time, and if you look at history, this is so critical.