The best use of a journal is to print the largest practical amount of important truth: truth which tends to make mankind wiser, and thus happier.

Fame is a vapor, popularity an accident, and riches take wings. Only one thing endures and that is character.

It is impossible to enslave, mentally or socially, a bible-reading people. The principles of the bible are the groundwork of human freedom.

Go West, young man, go West. There is health in the country, and room away from our crowds of idlers and imbeciles.

Common sense is very uncommon.

The darkest hour in any man's life is when he sits down to plan how to get money without earning it.

We are not one people. We are two peoples. We are a people for Freedom and a people for Slavery. Between the two, conflict is inevitable.

I am the inferior of any man whose rights I trample underfoot.

A cigar has "...a fire at one end and a fool at the other."

Ah! if the pulpit would practice what it preaches, then all would be well.

Journalism kills you, but it keeps you alive as long as you're doing it.

I always like to have an atlas just so that I can find things out. It's always good to have an almanac; those sort of things.

When you look fear in the face, you are able to say to yourself, 'I lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.'

When you are learning a new technique, practice it wholeheartedly until you truly understand it.

I imagine my children are going to save me from my vanity and be my passion and fill whatever fears I have of the amazing time I'm having right now being gone.

I think having wild, huge hair, is me being my own version of a lioness.

When people tap into this politics of resentment, it usually ends ugly.

The novel since its origins has been the privatization of history... the history of private life ... and in that sense every novel is an historical novel.

First we become the best, then we'll become first.

America is the most giving nation on Earth. One of the best ways to feel better is by doing something for somebody else.

Zen is influenced by Daoism, which is not so much a nature-religion in the animistic sense as a nature-philosophy in a cosmic sense.