"This view of the case amused Esther for a time, but not for long — the matter was too serious for any treatment but a joke, and joking made it more serious still."

"One is a saint or one is not; every man can choose the career that suits him; but to be saint and sinner at the same time requires singular ingenuity."

"Mystery for mystery science beats religion hollow. I can't open my mouth in my lecture-room without repeating ten times as many unintelligible formulas as ever Hazard is forced to do in his church."

"An artist must be man, woman and demi-god."

"I know of nothing useful in life except what is beautiful or creates beauty."

"Every one who marries goes it blind, more or less."

"Wharton was captivated by her sweet face, and tried to make her understand his theory that the merit of a painting was not so much in what it explained as in what it suggested."

"...any woman will, under the right conditions, marry any man at any time, provided her "higher nature" is properly appealed to."

"She regarded men as creatures made for women to dispose of."

"The audacity of the man would have seemed sublime if she had felt sure that he knew the difference between good and evil, between a lie and the truth; but the more she saw of him, the surer she was that his courage was mere moral paralysis, and that he talked about virtue and vice as a man who is colour-blind talks about red and green; he did not see them as she saw them; if left to choose for himself he would have nothing to guide him. Was it politics that had caused this atrophy of the moral senses by disuse? Meanwhile, here she sat face to face with a moral lunatic."

"Who, then, is right? How can we all be right? Half of our wise men declare that the world is going straight to perdition; the other half that it is fast becoming perfect. Both cannot be right."

"I have faith; not perhaps in the old dogmas, but in the new ones; faith in human nature; faith in science; faith in the survival of the fittest. Let us be true to our time, Mrs. Lee!"

"I have got so far as to lose the distinction between right and wrong. Isn't that the first step in politics?"

"In this atmosphere of charity, where all faiths were alike and all professions joined hands, the church and the world became one."

"Like most vigorous-minded men, seeing that there was no stopping-place between dogma and negation, he preferred to accept dogma. Of all weaknesses he most disliked timid and half-hearted faith. He would rather have jumped at once to Strong's pure denial, than yield an inch to the argument that a mystery was to be paltered with because it could not be explained."

"Man has mounted science, and is now run away with. I firmly believe that before many centuries more, science will be the master of men. The engines he will have invented will be beyond his strength to control. Someday science may have the existence of mankind in its power, and the human race commit suicide, by blowing up the world."

"I disagree with my brother Charles and Theodore Roosevelt. I think that Lee should have been hanged. It was all the worse that he was a good man and a fine character and acted conscientiously. These facts have nothing to do with the case and should not have been allowed to interfere with just penalties. It's always the good men who do the most harm in the world."

"I turn green in bed at midnight if I think of the horror of a year's warfare in the Philippines ... We must slaughter a million or two foolish Malays in order to give them the comforts of flannel petticoats and electric railways."

"A period of about twelve years measured the beat of the pendulum. After the Declaration of Independence, twelve years had been needed to create an efficient Constitution; another twelve years of energy brought a reaction against the government then created; a third period of twelve years was ending in a sweep toward still greater energy; and already a child could calculate the result of a few more such returns."

"We never despised the world or its opinions, we only failed to find out its existence. The world, if it exists, feels exactly in the same way towards us, and cares not one straw whether we exist or not. Philosophy has never got beyond this point. There are but two schools: one turns the world onto me; the other turns me onto the world; and the result is the same. The so-called me is a very, very small and foolish puppy-dog, but it is all that exists, and it tries all its life to get a little bigger by enlarging its energies, and getting dollars or getting friends."

"For reasons which many persons thought ridiculous, Mrs. Lightfoot Lee decided to pass the winter in Washington. She was in excellent health, but she said that the climate would do her good."

"Never was the Church blessed with a stranger ally than this freest of free thinkers, who looked at churches very much as he would have looked at a layer of extinct oysters in a buried mud-bank. Strong's notion was that since the Church continued to exist, it probably served some necessary purpose in human economy, though he could himself no more understand the good of it than he could comprehend the use of human existence in any shape. Since men and women were here, idiotic and purposeless as they might be, they had what they chose to call a right to amuse themselves in their own way, and if this way made some happy without hurting others, Strong was ready enough to help."

"I am never afraid of pure atheism; it is the flabby kind of sentimental deism that annoys me, because it is as slippery as air."

"She fell in love with the cataract and turned to it as a confidant, not because of its beauty or power, but because it seemed to tell her a story which she longed to understand."

"Rather by instinct than by guidance, he turned to writing, and his professors or tutors occasionally gave his English composition a hesitating approval; but in that branch, as in all the rest, even when he made a long struggle for recognition, he never convinced his teachers that his abilities, at their best, warranted placing him on the rank-list, among the first third of his class. Instructors generally reach a fairly accurate gauge of their scholars' powers."

"You got to believe in the ball, and throw your self. (Not Another Teen Movie)"

"Teachin' fools some basic rules! (I pity the fool)"

"I don't hate fools, I pity them! (I pity the fool)"

"Hey fool, this ain't no football game! (A-Team)"

"Life's tough, but I'm tougher! (I pity the fool)"

"Eight out of twenty?!? That's only a third, and third rhymes with Turd! That's bad."

"Love is a verb... and Verbs show action"

"The jibba jabba stops here! (I pity the fool)"

"You gonna lose a deal over $35? Thats chump change! My lunch cost $35!"

"Mother, I always Love Her. My Mother. So treat Her right, treat Her right."

"Mother, There is No Other. Like Mother So treat Her right, treat Her right."

"It's a crack baby....FOOL"

"What!?! Idiot shot the tires on my van!!"

"Hannibal is on the jazz."

"I pity the fool, thug, or soul who tries to take over the world."

"I pity Screech, because everybody pitied Screech. --NBC 75th Anniversary Special"

"I got no time for the jibba-jabba."

"Where's the meat? This sandwich is full of weeds! I don't eat nothing I don't know!"

"Don't make me mad, Arrr!"

"Hey, sucka!"

"Shut up Murdock, crazy fool!"

"I ain't getting on no plane, Hannibal!"

"I'm on a real short leash here, and I'm tired of your crazy rap!"

"I pity that chump Conan O'Brien."

"I'm not perfect, I'm not an angel, but I try to live a certain way because it brings honour and respect to my mother. I tell people that when they look at me, they're looking at nothing but a big, overgrown, tough mama's boy. That's who I am."