There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.

I have learned to use the word impossible with the greatest caution.

In the first place, any group of folks willing to make asses of themselves in pursuit of a good time should be commended and encouraged: The spirit of human frolic needs all the help it can get.

People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.

Thinking is easy, acting is difficult, and to put one's thoughts into action is the most difficult thing in the world

The greatest evil that can befall man is that he should come to think ill of himself.

If each of us sweeps in front of our own steps, the whole world will be clean.

You've got that eternal idiotic idea that if anarchy came it would come from the poor.  Why should it?  The poor have been rebels, but they have never been anarchists; they have more interest than any one else in there being some decent government.  The poor man really has a stake in the country. The rich man hasn't; he can go away to New Guinea in a yacht. The poor have sometimes been objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all.  Aristocrats were always anarchists, as you can see from the barons' wars.

If we could read the secret history of our enemies we should find in each man's life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility.

It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.