Honor is the most capricious in her rewards. She feeds us with air, and often pulls down our house, to build our monument.

True friendship is like sound health; the value of it is seldom known until it is lost.

Nothing more completely baffles one who is full of trick and duplicity himself, than straight forward and simple integrity in another.

The soundest argument will produce no more conviction in an empty head than the most superficial declamation; as a feather and a guinea fall with equal velocity in a vacuum.

The art of declamation has been sinking in value from the moment that speakers were foolish enough to publish, and hearers wise enough to read.

None are so fond of secrets as those who do not mean to keep them; such persons covet secrets as a spendthrift covets money, for the purpose of circulation.

Much may be done in those little shreds and patches of time which every day produces, and which most men throw away.

Let those who would affect singularity with success first determine to be very virtuous, and they will be sure to be very singular.

Atheism is a system which can communicate neither warmth nor illumination, except from those fagots which your mistaken zeal has lighted up for its destruction.

Deliberate with caution, but act with decision and yield with graciousness, or oppose with firmness.

The study of mathematics, like the Nile, begins in minuteness but ends in magnificence.

Creativity is not intelligence, it is the ability to do what you did not know through the use of what you know.

If you want a vision of the future, imagine someone watching a boot stamping on a human face - forever...and ‘liking’ it.

With two teenagers in the house, we sometimes experience a degree of domestic turbulence that sounds, to my ear, like a boiling teakettle filled with hormones shrieking on a stove.

Killing animals to make a fashion statement = a sickening + cold-blooded vanity.

So many people die with their dreams in their hands.

Poets heap virtues, painters gems, at will, And show their zeal, and hide their want of skill.

A little man often cast a long shadow.

I follow a set of principles; I follow the Constitution. And that's what I base my votes on. Limited government, economic freedom, and individual liberty.

I would not read the proof of one of my books for any fair & reasonable sum whatever, if I could get out of it. The proof-reading on the P & Pauper cost me the last rags of my religion.

To be a writer you need to see things as they are, and to see things as they are you need a certain basic innocence.