At best Madrid is a hole, but in rainy weather it is a place fit only to drown rats in.

In practice, such trifles as contradictions in principle are easily set aside; the faculty of ignoring them makes the practical man.

It is impossible to underrate human intelligence -- beginning with one's own.

A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stop.

A teacher affects eternity, and can never tell where the influence stops.

Accidents count for much in companionship in marriage.

No man should be in politics unless he would honestly rather not be there.

Philosophy: Unintelligible answers to insoluble problems.

One friend in a lifetime is much, two are many, three are hardly possible. Friendship needs a certain parallelism of life, a community of thought, a rivalry of aim.

While Ross and Cockburn were hastily burning the White House and Department buildings, anxious only to escape, and never sending more than two hundred soldiers beyond Capitol Square, the President, his Cabinet, his generals, and his army were performing movements at which even the American people, though outraged and exasperated beyond endurance, could not but laugh.