I draw from life - but I always pulp my acquaintance before serving them up. You would never recognize a pig in a sausage.

The Yankee: In acuteness and perseverance, he resembles the Scotch. In frugal neatness, he resembles the Dutch. But in truth, a Yankee is nothing else on earth but himself.

I very seldom, during my whole stay in the country, heard a sentence elegantly turned, and correctly pronounced from the lips of an American.

there is less alms-giving in America than in any other Christian country on the face of the globe. It is not in the temper of the people either to give or to receive.

The total and universal want of manners, both in males and females, is ... remarkable ... that polish which removes the coarser and rougher parts of our nature is unknown and undreamed of.

When newspapers are the principal vehicles of the wit and wisdom of a people, the higher graces of composition can hardly be looked for.

To an American writer, I should think it must be a flattering distinction to escape the admiration of the newspapers.

I have listened to much dull and heavy conversation in America, but rarely to any that I could strictly call silly (if I except the every where privileged class of very young ladies).

It seems hardly fair to quarrel with a place because its staple commodity is not pretty, but I am sure I should have liked Cincinnati much better if the people had not dealt so very largely in hogs.

All the freedom enjoyed in America, beyond what is enjoyed in England, is enjoyed solely by the disorderly at the expense of the orderly.

It is rarely [Americans] dine in society, except in taverns and boarding-houses. Then they eat with the greatest possible rapidity, and in total silence.

I write because it's the only thing I love that always loves me back.

Did anyone else have these moments of amazement over the existence of humanity, when they are in awe of how they are here, and alive, even if it's only for a short while?

And that's where the whole trouble is. We're too much alike to understand each other because we don't even understand our own selves.

Nothing is ever in such short supply at a race track as time. It doesn't seem to matter whether we are at the track for a race meeting or for testing - there is never enough time.

The whole world opens when we accept this moment, this very moment.

You want to do Olympics just like you do a pro football game or a basketball game? Be my guest. Watch it all fade away.

Youth is no less vulnerable, by the very quality it has of making the heart ache that beholds and has lost it.

The very first step in nonviolence is that we cultivate in our daily life, as between ourselves, truthfulness, humility, tolerance, loving kindness.

Man seems to insist on ignoring the lessons available from history.

Don't live every day as if it were your last. Live every day as if it were your first.