Quote Category

Let America first praise mediocrity even, in her children, before she praises… the best excellence in the children of any other land.

To be hated cordially, is only a left-handed compliment.

Decadence is a difficult word to use since it has become little more than a term of abuse applied by critics to anything they do not yet understand or which seems to differ from their moral concepts.

The inspiration of the Bible depends upon the ignorance of the gentleman who reads it.

Modern medicine is a negation of health. It isn’t organized to serve human health, but only itself, as an institution. It makes more people sick than it heals.

I criticize by creation – not by finding fault.

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

Platitude: an idea (a) that is admitted to be true by everyone, and (b) that is not true.

Truth is the silliest thing under the sun. Try to get a living by the Truth and go to the Soup Societies. Heavens! Let any clergyman try to preach the Truth from its very stronghold, the pulpit, and they would ride him out of his church on his own pulpit bannister.

I am sorry to think that you do not get a man’s most effective criticism until you provoke him. Severe truth is expressed with some bitterness.