"There is one way, and only one, of correctly reading a Latin hexameter. There may be three or four ways of reading an English blank verse line. I venture to say that no two mortals ever read aloud any given long passage of verse with precisely the same rhythms."

"Free verse may be written as very beautiful prose; prose may be written as very beautiful free verse. Which is which ?"

"As a rule, you'll not have much trouble having your way, if you are right."

"To want your own way is a very bad habit, for you will never get it."

"A loafer never works except when there's a fire; then he will carry out more furniture than anybody."

"When you hear that a certain man is so good that he wants to help everybody, you may depend upon it that he started the story."

"I know what women expect, and give it to them without disagreeable argument; they'll get it anyway."

"No man has all the wisdom in the world; everyone has some."

"When a man is trying to sell you something, don't imagine he is that polite all the time."

"There is usually enough of everything on the table except cream."

"However disagreeable a situation is to you, you cannot get rid of it by indignation."

"Every man has a long list of things that should be done, but which he knows can't be done. Yet he continues to talk about them as long as he lives."

"I have noticed that my likes and dislikes do not create any great excitement. And how people try to get away when I attempt to talk!"

"Every time you become confidential with some people, you hear of a new kind of dirty trick."

"Another thing which is about as sure as death and taxes, is that no man can go on bluffing indefinitely without being called."

"The experience of the world is worth more than the experience of any one man."

"A small man always has one weapon he can use against a great big man: he can "talk" about him."

"The trouble in the world is nearly all due to the fact that one-half of the people are men, and the other half women."

"Abusing the prosperous in order to curry the favor of the envious, is an old game that still works better than it should."

"Always remember that if a man knows where he can make a dollar, he will not tell you about it; he will go after it himself."

"Silliness which would have broken a politician twenty years ago, now makes his fortune."

"One of the most difficult things in the world is to learn to take a hint easily."

"Automobiles are like people: the cheap ones are noisy."

"Having fun is a dismal business after you pass fifty."

"When you can't do anything else to a boy, you can make him wash his face."

"People hate the man who is a constant drain on their sympathy."

"So many of the optimists in the world don't own a hundred dollars, and because of their optimism, never will."

"Men are virtuous because the women are; women are virtuous from necessity."

"No man knows where his business ends and his neighbor's begins."

"The man who can keep a secret may be wise, but he is not half as wise as the man with no secrets to keep."

"A man who does not fool himself seldom cares much about fooling others. But the man who claims to have seen a ghost wants everybody else to believe in ghosts."

"We are now confronted with the necessity of remedying the remedies."

"A man needs a friend not to flatter him, but to strengthen him at his weak points."

"A woman does not spend all her time in buying things; she spends part of it in taking them back."

"Of living creatures, business men are nearest sane; their philosophy is as accurate as their multiplication table."

"When half the people believe one thing, and the other half another, it is usually safe to accept either opinion. The Democrats are as good as the Republicans, and the Catholics as good as the Protestants."

"The preponderant weight of economic power in the Constitutional Convention, while conceding the outward forms of political democracy, went on at once to curb the exercise of the very power it had just granted; it crippled the force of democratic power at the source by parceling up this power by a marvelously dexterous system of barriers to its expression. Thus political equality under the ballot was granted on the unstated but factually double-locked assumption that the people must refrain from seeking the extension of that equality to the economic sphere. In short, the attempted harmonious marriage of democracy to capitalism doomed genuinely popular control from the start."

"Liberal democracy has never dared face the fact that industrial capitalism is an intensely coercive form of organization of society that cumulatively constrains men and all of their institutions to work the will of the minority who hold and wield economic power; and that this relentless warping of men's lives and forms of association becomes less and less the result of voluntary decisions by "bad" or "good" men and more and more an impersonal web of coercions dictated by the need to keep "the system" running."

"I see the tasks of social sciences to discover what kinds of order actually do exist in the whole range of the behavior of human beings; what kind of functional relationships between different parts of culture exist in space and over time, and what functionally more useful kinds of order can be created."

"The failure of the social sciences to think through and to integrate their several responsibilities for the common problem of relating the analysis of parts to the analysis of the whole constitutes one of the major lags crippling their utility as human tools of knowledge."

"Russia has always been several centuries behind western civilization. The Church, intrusted with secular power, is joined with the State. It prohibits any change of faith and even possesses the power to deprive a heretic of his property. Moreover, anyone proved to be a heretic or a nonconformist may be sent to a penal colony."

"The peasants [of Russia], only a short time free from serfdom, are wretchedly poor. ...The people in that country are about three-fourths illiterate, and the vast majority of the laboring people are peasants. Floggings are of daily occurrence, and the fatalism common to all backward peoples is widespread in Russia."

"Among them exists an immense opportunity for the spread of views such as Tolstoy held, but instead of espousing their cause or seeking in any manner to organize the peasants for cooperative action, he [Tolstoy] invariably taught them submission, nonresistance to evil, loyalty to their masters, and the most extreme form of Christian humility and service."

"In the time of Jesus almost everybody worked in small shops or on the land and then sold or bartered their own products in the towns. There were no vast industrial centers, no great factories, no steam power or electricity. Everyone knew his neighbor by name. There was no highly developed division of labor, nor were there great extremes of wealth and poverty. Such economic conditions are ideal—or at least as nearly ideal as they can ever be—for the spread of Christian communism. And so they are still in many parts of Russia."

"When principles will not work out in practice and the obstructions confronting men are too great, even the most faithful give way. And this, so far as we know, is what happened to every Tolstoyan."

"Although Tolstoy in his protest recognized the fact that he was bound up with all others, neither this nor the knowledge of his individual helplessness induced him to work with others in order to change any part of the infamous governmental system of Russia."

"His [Tolstoy's] interpretation of the Christian teaching is very similar to that which prevailed in nearly every peasant community in western Europe in the Middle Ages. Like doctrines gave rise to a peasant movement in Armenia in the ninth century, and in the fourteenth; a revolt of the peasants in England resulted from the teaching of the Lollards. The Anabaptists, the Hussites, and many other sects of Christian communists arose in the following centuries. There is a peculiar soil in which these doctrines take root. Wherever the chief economic problem is the unjust distribution of land, Christian communism seems to appeal to the masses."

"The poor did not hear such doctrines gladly and they were not at all disposed to follow the teaching of Tolstoy. ...such teaching was no more acceptable to the peasants than some of Tolstoy's other views were to his wife and to the Government. ...The more enlightened of their leaders looked upon him as a reactionary, standing in the way of the people's progress."

"Thrift and foresight are among the chief teachings of all missionaries to the poor and the present day world has little sympathy for any parent—whether a Harold Skimpole, a Mrs. Jellyby, a Jean Jacques Rousseau, or a Leo Tolstoy—who for any cause whatsoever feels that he should give no thought for the morrow and that his children may live like the fowls of the air."

"If it is impossible to induce fathers to abandon their families, how much more impossible would it be to induce mothers? When Tolstoy sought to live the truly Christian life, the immediate obstacle he found in his path was his own wife. ...The next world had to take care of itself. She was burdened with dependents in this world, and like nearly every other mother-animal in creation, she insisted, in so far as she was able, upon feeding and protecting her young. She was as impervious as a tigress, concealing the lair of her young, to the teaching that a Christian must be willing to sacrifice everything and everybody in pursuit of truth."