Politics is a place of humble hopes and strangely modest requirements, where all are good who are not criminal and all are wise who are not ridiculously otherwise.
— Frank Moore Colby
A 'new thinker', when studied closely, is merely a man who does not know what other people have thought.
Persecution was at least a sign of personal interest. Tolerance is composed of nine parts of apathy to one of brotherly love.
That is the consolation of a little mind; you have the fun of changing it without impeding the progress of mankind.
Talk ought always to run obliquely, not nose to nose with no chance of mental escape.
Every improvement in communication makes the bore more terrible.
If a large city can, after intense intellectual efforts, choose for its mayor a man who merely will not steal from it, we consider it a triumph of the suffrage.
Men will confess to treason, murder, arson, false teeth, or a wig. How many of them will own up to a lack of humor?
Every man ought to be inquisitive through every hour of his great adventure down to the day when he shall no longer cast a shadow in the sun. For if he dies without a question in his heart, what excuse is there for his continuance?
We do not mind our not arriving anywhere nearly so much as our not having any company on the way.
Many people lose their tempers merely from seeing you keep yours.
Clever people seem not to feel the natural pleasure of bewilderment, and are always answering questions when the chief relish of a life is to go on asking them.
One learns little more about a man from the feats of his literary memory than from the feats of his alimentary canal.
The New York playgoer is a child of nature, and he has an honest and wholesome regard of whatever is atrocious in art.
I have found some of the best reasons I ever had for remaining at the bottom simply by looking at the men at the top.
We always carry out by committee anything in which any one of us alone would be too reasonable to persist.
I know of no more disagreeable situation than to be left feeling generally angry without anybody in particular to be angry at.
Cast your cares on God; that anchor holds.
