The disease and its medicine are like two factions in a besieged town; they tear one another to pieces, but both unite against their common enemy, Nature.

Opinions founded on prejudice are always sustained with the greatest of violence.

Satire is a composition of salt and mercury; and it depends upon the different mixture and preparation of those ingredients, that it comes out a noble medicine, or a rank poison.

Derision is never so agonizing as when it pounces on the wanderings of misguided sensibility.

The cheat ambition, eager to espouse dominion, courts it with a lying show, and shines in borrowed pomp to serve a turn.

There is nothing respecting which a man may be so long unconscious as of the extent and strength of his prejudices.

Damn the Solar System. Bad light; planets too distant; pestered with comets; feeble contrivance; could make a better myself.

Nothing is so firmly than that which is least known.

Simplicity of manner is the last attainment. Men are very long afraid of being natural, from the dread of being taken for ordinary.

An obligation is something which constrains or induces us to act.

The fundamentalist religions simply seem to offer more hope for a brighter future than do the more liberal, humanistic ones.

stereotypes are awfully misleading. There are typical librarians, but not all librarians are typical.

Debts and lies are generally mixed together.

Those who dare to try what others only dream of - never fail to discover that real effort is always rewarded.

To grow up in intimate association with nature - animal and vegetable - is an irreplaceable form of wealth and culture.

We have a president, who I think is a nice guy, but he spent too much time at Harvard, perhaps.

I'm extemely competitive, so when people start counting me out or trying to categorise me, I sorta get hungry.

I know a lot less about God, but the things I know about God, I know a whole lot more, for sure.

Certainty becomes you.

So true it is, that nature has caprices which art cannot imitate.