A friend in power is a friend lost.

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

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

Accident counts for as much in companionship as in marriage.

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

As for America, it is the ideal fruit of all your youthful hopes and reforms. Everybody is fairly decent, respectable, domestic, bourgeois, middle-class, and tiresome. There is absolutely nothing to revile except that it’s a bore.

Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit.

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

He saw Mr. Lincoln but once; at the melancholy function called an Inaugural Ball. Of course he looked anxiously for a sign of character. He saw a long, awkward figure; a plain, ploughed face; a mind, absent in part, and in part evidently worried by white kid gloves; features that expressed neither self-satisfaction nor any other familiar Americanism, but rather the same painful sense of becoming educated and of needing education that tormented a private secretary, above all a lack of apparent force. Any private secretary in the least fit for his business would have thought, as Adams did, that no man living needed so much education as the new President but that all the education he could get would not be enough.

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