Let us be thankful for the fools. But for them the rest of us could not succeed.

Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.

Just the omission of Jane Austen's books alone would make a fairly good library out of a library that hadn't a book in it.

It was wonderful to find America, but it would have been more wonderful to miss it.

It usually takes more than three weeks to prepare a good impromptu speech.

It is easier to stay out than get out.

It is curious that physical courage should be so common in the world and moral courage so rare.

It is better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool than to open it and remove all doubt.

It is better to deserve honors and not have them than to have them and not to deserve them.

It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly American criminal class except Congress.

In the first place, God made idiots. That was for practice. Then he made school boards.

In religion and politics, people's beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second hand, and without examination.

In Paris they simply stared when I spoke to them in French; I never did succeed in making those idiots understand their language.

In his private heart no man respects himself.

If you tell the truth you don't have to remember anything.

If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and a man.

If all men knew what each said of the other, there would not be four friends in the world.

I would rather have my ignorance than another man's knowledge, because I have got so much more of it.

I was gratified to be able to answer promptly. I said I don't know.

I thoroughly disapprove of duels. If a man should challenge me, I would take him kindly and forgivingly by the hand and lead him to a quiet place and kill him.