When we speak freely, let us speak plainly, for plain speech is wholesome; especially, plain speech about public affairs and public men.

The question of who is right and who is wrong has seemed to me always too small to be worth a moment's thought, while the question of what is right and what is wrong has seemed all-important.

The primary reason for a tariff is that it enables the exploitation of the domestic consumer by a process indistinguishable from sheer robbery.

As a general principle, I should put it that a man's country is where the things he loves are most respected. Circumstances may have prevented his ever setting foot there, but it remains his country.

Useless knowledge can be made directly contributory to a force of sound and disinterested public opinion.

There's only one way to improve society. Present it with a single improved unit: yourself.

It is unfortunately none too well understood that, just as the State has no money of its own, so it has no power of its own.

The mind is like the stomach. It is not how much you put into it that counts, but how much it digests...

As Dr. Sigmund Freud has observed, it can not even be said that the State has ever shown any disposition to suppress crime, but only to safeguard its own monopoly of crime.

I have often wondered why the sounds of the beating drums do not make the marching soldiers shoot their officers and go home.

For the majority of people liberty means only the system and the administrators they are used to.

She wondered which was worse—living your whole life staring at yourself or waiting your whole life for someone to stare back at you.

Being truly happy in life involves you feeling more in control of the direction your life is going.

It’s a baby. A baby can’t be without a mother.

If I have never mourned over my waywardness, then I have no solid ground for rejoicing.

I got to thinking that poems were like people. Some people you got right off the bat. Some people you just didn't get--and never would get.

I have taken care of everything in the course of my life, only not for death, and now I have to die completely unprepared.

Cats mean kittens, plentiful and frequent.

I would like to thank the incomparable William H. Macy for taking a chunky 22-year-old with a bad perm and glasses out into a cow pasture and kissing me and making me his wife.

She fell asleep, leaning on his chest, and he edged her a little off a particularly painful bruise, leaned his head back against the tree he had propped them up against, and closed his own eyes.

The habit of doing more than is necessary can only be earned through practice.