I was dead for millions of years before I was born and it never inconvenienced me a bit.

Everybody's private motto: It's better to be popular than right.

Seasickness: at first you are so sick you are afraid you will die, and then you are so sick you are afraid you won't die.

To arrive at a just estimate of a renowned man's character one must judge it by the standards of his time, not ours.

Until I came to New Mexico, I never realized how much beauty water adds to a river .

A public library is the most enduring of memorials, the trustiest monument for the preservation of an event or a name or an affection; for it, and it only, is respected by wars and revolutions, and survives them.

It would not be possible for Noah to do in our day what he was permitted to do in his own ... The inspector would come and examine the Ark, and make all sorts of objections.

To be, or not to be; that is the bare bodkin That makes calamity of so long life.

To string incongruities and absurdities together in a wandering and sometimes purposeless way, and seem innocently unaware that they are absurdities, is the basis of the American art, if my position is correct.

A man with a hump-backed uncle mustn't make fun of another man's cross-eyed aunt