"The American President resembles the commander of a ship at sea. He must have a helm to grasp, a course to steer, a port to seek."

"The proper study of mankind is woman."

"The woman who is known only through a man is known wrong."

"No man means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous."

"Morality is a private and costly luxury."

"One friend in a lifetime is much, two are many, three are hardly possible. Friendship needs a certain parallelism of life, a community of thought, a rivalry of aim."

"Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit."

"All experience is an arch, to build upon."

"It is always good men who do the most harm in the world."

"Philosophy: Unintelligible answers to insoluble problems."

"Politics, as a practice, whatever its professions, has always been the systematic organization of hatreds."

"There is no such thing as an underestimate of average intelligence."

"Simplicity is the most deceitful mistress that ever betrayed man."

"Politics are a very unsatisfactory game."

"It is impossible to underrate human intelligence - beginning with one's own."

"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."

"Power is poison. Its effect on Presidents had always been tragic."

"Young men have a passion for regarding their elders as senile."

"The difference is slight, to the influence of an author, whether he is read by five hundred readers, or by five hundred thousand; if he can select the five hundred, he reaches the five hundred thousand."

"Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts."

"Everyone carries his own inch rule of taste, and amuses himself by applying it, triumphantly, wherever he travels."

"Absolute liberty is absence of restraint; responsibility is restraint; therefore, the ideally free individual is responsible to himself."

"American society is a sort of flat, fresh-water pond which absorbs silently, without reaction, anything which is thrown into it."

"Knowledge of human nature is the beginning and end of political education."

"He too serves a certain purpose who only stands and cheers."

"No man likes to have his intelligence or good faith questioned, especially if he has doubts about it himself."

"Only on the edge of the grave can man conclude anything."

"Friends are born, not made."

"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 nobody and nothing."

"Practical politics consists in ignoring facts."

"Power when wielded by abnormal energy is the most serious of facts."

"Susceptibility to the highest forces is the highest genius."

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

"A teacher affects eternity he can never tell, where his influence stops."

"The progress of evolution from President Washington to President Grant was alone evidence to upset Darwin."

"No man, however strong, can serve ten years as schoolmaster, priest, or Senator, and remain fit for anything else."

"Chaos was the law of nature; Order was the dream of man."

"A friend in power is a friend lost."