Things perfected by nature are better than those finished by art.

Politicians are not born; they are excreted.

Poor is the nation that has no heroes, but poorer still is the nation that having heroes, fails to remember and honor them.

It is the peculiar quality of a fool to perceive the faults of others and to forget his own.

Read at every wait; read at all hours; read within leisure; read in times of labor; read as one goes in; read as one goest out. The task of the educated mind is simply put: read to lead.

We learn nothing from history except that we learn nothing from history.

It is not enough to acquire wisdom, it is necessary to employ it.

Times are bad. Children no longer obey their parents, and everyone is writing a book.

Nothing is more unreliable than the populace, nothing more obscure than human intentions, nothing more deceptive than the whole electoral system.

To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child.

If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.

Now the need for seeking something outside will completely disappear. Once you are blissful by your own nature, your life becomes an expression of your blissfulness, not a pursuit of happiness.

I don't think a white person can write accurately and convincingly about what black people experience of oppression.

I don't speak particularly well. That's one of the consequences of being extremely ugly.

Sometimes things reveal themselves to you a little bit. I think it was Joan Didion that said, "We write to find out what we're thinking." And sometimes that happens.

poetry had everything to teach me about life.

I think he will probably come round in time, I mean to renew the subject pretty often.

Man often overstates the trivial things and understates the vital ones!

For the most part, only the light characters travel. Who are you that have no task to keep you at home?

When somebody goes outside the cultural norms, the culture has to protect itself.

It is unsound for an independent editor to be a financial contributor to any cause which would cause any type of special pleading.