“Intellectually I know that America is no better than any other country.”

I love America, but I don’t like it.

Every compulsion is put upon writers to become safe, polite, obedient, and sterile.

He loved the people just as much as he feared and detested persons.

So much in a revolution is nothing but waiting.

Love is the one thing that can really sure-enough lighten all of life’s dark clouds.

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.

In that moment I know exactly what I want; I want to peel away all the layers of clothing between us, strip away everything that separates us, the past and the present and the future.

Till taught by pain, men know not water’s worth.

That by desiring what is perfectly good, even when we don’t quite know what it is and cannot do what we would, we are part of the divine power against evil — widening the skirts of light and making the struggle with darkness narrower.

Lying is the misuse of language. We know that. We need to remember that it works the other way round too.

I didn’t know that idiocy caused people to just start spontaneously bleeding from the nose.

I might not know who I was yesterday or who I’m going to be tomorrow, but I know who I am right now.

I think it’s horrible that people have to be told. Don’t smoke! Everybody knows it’s bad for the health. But they have to forbid it.

Since we think about ourselves so much of the time, it is comforting to assume … that we really know the score…. [But] this is not an easy assignment.