Reform is born of need, not pity.

But, after all, we are a young nation, and vanity is a fault of youth.

Crime, to the man of the forties, was an alien monstrous terror.

No man surely has so short a memory as the American.

Our young people have come to look upon war as a kind of beneficent deity, which not only adds to the national honor but uplifts a nation and develops patriotism and courage.

The only hero known to my childhood was Henry Clay.

War may be an armed angel with a mission, but she has the personal habits of the slums.

Every child was taught from his cradle that money was Mammon, the chief agent of the flesh and the devil.

I went to Concord, a young woman from the backwoods, firm in belief that Emerson was the first of living men. He was the modern Moses who had talked with God apart and could interpret Him to us.

You were only truly patriotic if you had a laborer for a grandfather and were glad of it.

We have grown used to money. The handling, the increase of it, is the chief business of life now with most of us.

But remember, I am no politician, and no seer into souls.

The sun, the earth, love, friends, our very breath are parts of the banquet.

TO preach a sermon or edit a newspaper were the two things in life which I always felt I could do with credit to myself and benefit to the world, if I only had the chance.

The histories which we have of the great tragedy give no idea of the general wretchedness, the squalid misery, which entered into every individual life in the region given up to the war. Where the armies camped the destruction was absolute.

America may have great poets and novelists, but she never will have more than one necromancer.

It has happened to me to meet many of the men of my day whom the world agreed to call great.

Our village was built on the Ohio River, and was a halting place on this great national road, then the only avenue of traffic between the South and the North.

We don't often look into these unpleasant details of our great struggle. We all prefer to think that every man who wore the blue or gray was a Philip Sidney at heart.

Sitting by the chimney corner as we grow old, the commonest things around us take on live meanings and hint at the difference between these driving times and the calm, slow moving days when we were young.

For, after all, put it as we may to ourselves, we are all of us from birth to death guests at a table which we did not spread.

You will find the poet who wrings the heart of the world, or the foremost captain of his time, driving a bargain or paring a potato, just as you would do.

It is a good rule never to see or talk to the man whose words have wrung your heart, or helped it, just as it is wise not to look down too closely at the luminous glow which sometimes shines on your path on a summer night, if you would not see the ugly worm below.

It was part of your religion to hate the British.

Reform is born of need, not pity.

I just had to plod along without having any teaching, which was a pity.

More helpful than all wisdom is one draught of simple human pity that will not forsake us.

It's a pity one can't imagine what one can't compare to anything. Genius is an African who dreams up snow.

If you have men who will exclude any of God's creatures from the shelter of compassion and pity, you will have men who will deal likewise with their fellow men.

What a pity human beings can't exchange problems. Everyone knows exactly how to solve the other fellow's.

It is a pity that instead of the Pilgrim Fathers landing on Plymouth Rock, Plymouth Rock had not landed on the Pilgrim Fathers.

It's a pity that I can never really enjoy my movies because, after the mixing, your capacity as a spectator just disappears. I have to think about what I felt just before the mixing.

Often it does seem a pity that Noah and his party did not miss the boat.

Adam knew Eve his wife and she conceived. It is a pity that this is still the only knowledge of their wives at which some men seem to arrive.

As a boy I used to go to the Chamber of Horrors at the annual fair, to look at the wax figures of Emperors and Kings, of heroes and murderers of the day. The dead now had that same unreality, which shocks without arousing pity.

Pity? You don't want to be pitied because you're a cripple in a wheelchair? Stay in your house!

I never knew whether to pity or congratulate a man on coming to his senses.

A mixture of admiration and pity is one of the surest recipes for affection.

It's a mistake to confuse pity with love.

To love with the spirit is to pity, and he who pities most loves most.

Language is a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we long to move the stars to pity.

The usual fortune of complaint is to excite contempt more than pity.

My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity.

Pity speaks to grief More sweetly than a band of instruments.

We shall stick it out to the end, but we are getting weaker of course and the end cannot be far. It seems a pity, but I do not think I can write more. For God's sake, look after our people.

The machine has had a pernicious effect upon virtue, pity, and love, and young men used to machines which induce inertia, and fear, are near impotent.

We need to suffer, that we may learn to pity.

It will be a pity if women in the more conventional mould are to be phased out, for there will never be anyone to go home to.

To be loved at first sight, a man should have at the same time something to respect and something to pity in his face.