I would define, in brief, the poetry of words as the rhythmical creation of Beauty.

All is disgust when a man leaves his own nature and does what is unfit.

A place for everything, and everything in its place.

Beauty of whatever kind, in its supreme development, invariably excites the sensitive soul to tears.

Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish.

I just want to retire before I go senile because if I don't retire before I go senile, then I'll do more damage than good at that point.

All the perplexities, confusion and distress in America arise, not from defects in their Constitution or Confederation, not from want of honor or virtue, so much as from the downright ignorance of the nature of coin, credit and circulation.

As I grow older, I pay less attention to what men say. I just watch what they do.

Wine is wonderful stuff. But so many people are put off by the snobbery of it.

All men are liable to error; and most men are, in many points, by passion or interest, under temptation to it.

There is no real ending. It's just the place where you stop the story.

Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.

Radical simply means 'grasping things at the root'.

There's no such thing as perfect writing, just like there's no such thing as perfect despair.

How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.

Racism is a much more clandestine, much more hidden kind of phenomenon, but at the same time it's perhaps far more terrible than it's ever been.

If you could kick the person in the pants responsible for most of your trouble, you wouldn't sit for a month.

Delay always breeds danger. To protract a great design is often to ruin it.

The future ain't what it used to be.

There is no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it.

We often discover what will do by finding out what will not do; and probably he who never made a mistake never made a discovery.