"I am an anarchist in politics and an impressionist in art as well as a symbolist in literature. Not that I understand what these terms mean, but I take them to be all merely synonyms of pessimist."

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

"Thank God, I never was cheerful. I come from the happy stock of the Mathers, who, as you remember, passed sweet mornings reflecting on the goodness of God and the damnation of infants."

"A man must now swallow more belief than he can digest."

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

"I tell you the solemn truth, that the doctrine of the Trinity is not so difficult to accept for a working proposition as any one of the axioms of physics."

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

"Politics... have always been the systematic organization of hatreds."

"Every man who has at last succeeded, after long effort, in calling up the divinity which lies hidden in a woman's heart, is startled to find that he must obey the God he summoned."

"One friend in a lifetime is much; two are many; three hardly possible."