“A friend in power is a friend lost.”
“The proper study of mankind is woman.”
“They know enough who know how to learn.”
“Morality is a private and costly luxury.”
“Unintelligible answers to insoluble problems.”
“Practical politics consists in ignoring facts.”
“Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit.”
“The woman who is known only through a man is known wrong.”
“Accident counts for as much in companionship as in marriage.”
“Power is poison. It's effect on Presidents had always been tragic.”
“A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.”
“It is impossible to underrate human intelligence -- beginning with one's own.”
“Politics, whatever its professions, has always been the systematic organization of hatreds.”
“Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts.”
“No man means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous.”
“No man likes to have his intelligence or good faith questioned, especially if he has doubts about it himself.”
“Everyone carries his own inch rule of taste, and amuse himself by applying it, triumphantly, wherever he travels.”
“American society is a sort of flat, fresh-water pond which absorbs silently, without reaction, anything which is thrown into it.”
“Absolute liberty is absence of restraint; responsibility is restraint; therefore, the ideally free individual is responsible to himself.”
“One friend in a lifetime is much, two are many, three are hardly possible. Friendship needs a certain parallelism of life, a community of thought, a rivalry of aim.”
“As for America, it is the ideal fruit of all your youthful hopes and reforms. Everybody is fairly decent, respectable, domestic, bourgeois, middle-class, and tiresome. There is absolutely nothing to revile except that it's a bore.”