No man means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous.

Politics are a very unsatisfactory game.

A teacher affects eternity he can never tell, where his influence stops.

Accident counts for as much in companionship as in marriage.

It is always good men who do the most harm in the world.

Practical politics consists in ignoring facts.

The difference is slight, to the influence of an author, whether he is read by five hundred readers, or by five hundred thousand; if he can select the five hundred, he reaches the five hundred thousand.

Knowledge of human nature is the beginning and end of political education.

The press is the hired agent of a monied system, and set up for no other purpose than to tell lies where their interests are involved. One can trust nobody and nothing.

Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts.

A friend in power is a friend lost.

Only on the edge of the grave can man conclude anything.

At best, the renewal of broken relations is a nervous matter.

Morality is a private and costly luxury.

No man likes to have his intelligence or good faith questioned, especially if he has doubts about it himself.

Intimates are predestined.

It is impossible to underrate human intelligence – beginning with one’s own.

All experience is an arch, to build upon.

Young men have a passion for regarding their elders as senile.

The woman who is known only through a man is known wrong.

Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit.

Friends are born, not made.

No man, however strong, can serve ten years as schoolmaster, priest, or Senator, and remain fit for anything else.

Politics, as a practice, whatever its professions, has always been the systematic organization of hatreds.

Power when wielded by abnormal energy is the most serious of facts.

American society is a sort of flat, fresh-water pond which absorbs silently, without reaction, anything which is thrown into it.

There is no such thing as an underestimate of average intelligence.

Chaos was the law of nature; Order was the dream of man.

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.

The progress of evolution from President Washington to President Grant was alone evidence to upset Darwin.

The proper study of mankind is woman.

Power is poison. Its effect on Presidents had always been tragic.

Everyone carries his own inch rule of taste, and amuses himself by applying it, triumphantly, wherever he travels.

No man means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous.

They know enough who know how to learn.

Susceptibility to the highest forces is the highest genius.

The effect of power and publicity on all men is the aggravation of self, a sort of tumor that ends by killing the victim’s sympathies.

He too serves a certain purpose who only stands and cheers.

Simplicity is the most deceitful mistress that ever betrayed man.

The American President resembles the commander of a ship at sea. He must have a helm to grasp, a course to steer, a port to seek.

We combat obstacles in order to get repose, and when got, the repose is insupportable.

Absolute liberty is absence of restraint; responsibility is restraint; therefore, the ideally free individual is responsible to himself.

Philosophy: Unintelligible answers to insoluble problems.