“His name was George F. Babbitt, and . . . he was nimble in the calling of selling houses for more than people could afford to pay.”

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.

There are so many people in the world who are eager to do for you things that you do not wish done, provided only that you will do for them things that you don’t wish to do.

In protest, I declined election to the National Institute of Arts and Letters some years ago, and now I must decline the Pulitzer Prize.

Except for half a dozen in each town the citizens are proud of that achievement of ignorance which is so easy to come by.

To live in Carlsbad is seemly and to loaf at San Remo healing to the soul, but to get from Carlsbad to San Remo is of the devil.

If there is anything worse than the aching tedium of staring out of car windows.

I only weigh 220, so I have to do something to keep from being tossed around by all the guys who weigh 250 and more. I train hard, but I don’t try to get too big.

There is no teacher more discriminating or transforming than loss.

I think we need to simplify our tax code, but not as a way of generating revenue, as a way of making our tax code more growth- friendly.

Draft day is a hectic day, especially for draftees and, more or less, for management.

If the community is happy, then they support your business and if your business is doing well, then you can give back even more to the community.

Let’s cut the top rates of stamp duty to enable more movement to take place and also looking at the broader tax reform, simplifying our tax system.

There’s more impact if you burn somebody with your eyes, look straight into him and let him know with a look.

She was one of those Southerners who knew from an early age that the South could never be more for them than a fragrant prison, administered by a collective of loving but treacherous relatives.