“Every improvement in communication makes the bore more terrible.”
“Many people lose their tempers merely from seeing you keep yours.”
“Sin in this country has been always said to be rather calculating than impulsive.”
“Talk ought always to run obliquely, not nose to nose with no chance of mental escape.”
“We do not mind our not arriving anywhere nearly so much as our not having any company on the way.”
“We always carry out by committee anything in which any one of us alone would be too reasonable to persist.”
“One learns little more about a man from his feats of literary memory than from the feats of his alimentary canal.”
“That is the consolation of a little mind; you have the fun of changing it without impeding the progress of mankind.”
“Men will confess to treason, murder, arson, false teeth, or a wig. How many of them will own up to a lack of humor?”
“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.”
“The New York playgoer is a child of nature, and he has an honest and wholesome regard of whatever is atrocious in art.”
“Persecution was at least a sign of personal interest. Tolerance is composed of nine parts of apathy to one of brotherly love.”
“I know of no more disagreeable situation than to be left feeling generally angry without anybody in particular to be angry at.”
“Minds do not act together in public; they simply stick together; and when their private activities are resumed, they fly apart again.”
“By rights, satire is a lonely and introspective occupation, for nobody can describe a fool to the life without much patient self-inspection.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Averageness is a quality we must put up with. Men march toward civilization in column formation, and by the time the van has learned to admire the masters the rear is drawing reluctantly away from the totem pole.”