No historian can take part with--or against--the forces he has to study. To him even the extinction of the human race should merely be a fact to be g….

If Thought is capable of being classed with Electricity, or Will with chemical affinity, as a mode of motion, it seems necessary to fall at once unde….

[Adams] supposed that, except musicians, everyone thought Beethoven a bore, as every one except mathematicians thought mathematics a bore..

The press is the hired agent of a monied system, and set up for no other purpose than to tell lies where their interests are involved. One can trust ….

The first serious consciousness of Nature's gesture - her attitude towards life-took form then as a phantasm, a nightmare, all insanity of force. For….

Every syllable that can be struck out is pure profit, and every page that can be economised is a five-per-cent dividend. Nature rebels against this r….

A senator is like a begonia - showy but useless..

He never labored so hard to learn a language as he did to hold his tongue, and it affected him for life. The habit of reticence — of talking without ….

The effect of power and publicity on all men is the aggravation of self, a sort of tumor that ends by killing the victim's sympathies..

The idea that any personal deity could find pleasure or profit in torturing a poor woman, by accident, with a fiendish cruelty known to man only in p….

The tourist was the great conservative who hated novelty and adored dirt..

They know enough who know how to learn..

Some day science may have the existence of mankind in its power, and the human race commit suicide, by blowing up the world..

As a historian, he felt it his duty to respect everything that had ever been respected, except for the occasional statesman..

History is only a catalogue of the forgotten..

[regarding US conquest of the Philippines] I turn green in bed at midnight if I think of the horror of a year's warfare in the Philippines ... We mus….

The best date movies give you something to talk about. A movie that's a downer is a great way to find out about someone..

We combat obstacles in order to get repose, and when got, the repose is insupportable..

Power is poison. Its effect on Presidents had always been tragic, chiefly as an almost insane excitement at first, and a worse reaction afterwards..

In the history of the United States, there is no continuity at all. You can cut through it anywhere and nothing on this side of the cut has anything ….

The habit of expression leads to the search for something to express. Something remains as a residuum of the commonplace itself, if one strikes out e….