It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either of them.
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't.
Don't part with your illusions. When they are gone, you may still exist, but you have ceased to live.
In the first place, God made idiots. That was for practice. Then he made school boards.
Man is the only animal that blushes - or needs to.
A person with a new idea is a crank until the idea succeeds.
By trying we can easily learn to endure adversity. Another man's, I mean.
'Classic.' A book which people praise and don't read.
Pity is for the living, envy is for the dead.
Everyone is a moon, and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody.
It takes your enemy and your friend, working together, to hurt you to the heart: the one to slander you and the other to get the news to you.
Let us be thankful for the fools. But for them the rest of us could not succeed.
Everything human is pathetic. The secret source of humor itself is not joy but sorrow. There is no humor in heaven.
Truth is the most valuable thing we have. Let us economize it.
Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.
Prosperity is the best protector of principle.
There are two times in a man's life when he should not speculate: when he can't afford it, and when he can.
Baby, I have no idea how this will end. Maybe the equator will fall like a hula hoop from the earth's hips and our mouths will freeze mid-kiss on our 80th anniversary or maybe tomorrow my absolute insanity combined with the absolute obstacle course of your communication skills will leave us like a love letter in a landfill. But whatever, however, whenever this ends I want you to know that right now, I love you forever.
However, the small probability of a similar encounter [of the earth with a comet], can become very great in adding up over a huge sequence of centuries. It is easy to picture to oneself the effects of this impact upon the Earth. The axis and the motion of rotation changed; the seas abandoning their old position to throw themselves toward the new equator; a large part of men and animals drowned in this universal deluge, or destroyed by the violent tremor imparted to the terrestrial globe.
The long summer was over. For ages a tropical climate had prevailed over a great part of the earth, and animals whose home is now beneath the Equator roamed over the world from the far South to the very borders of the Arctics ... But their reign was over. A sudden intense winter, that was also to last for ages, fell upon our globe.
or simply: