You say that love is nonsense....I tell you it is no such thing. For weeks and months it is a steady physical pain, an ache about the heart, never leaving one, by night or by day a long strain on one's nerves like toothache or rheumatism, not intolerable at any one instant, but exhausting by its steady drain on the strength.
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Power is poison. Its effect on Presidents has been always tragic, chiefly as an almost indecent excitement at first, and a worse reaction afterwards; but also because no mind is so well balanced as to bear the strain of seizing unlimited force without habit or knowledge of it; and finding it disputed with him by hungry packs of wolves and hounds whose lives depend on snatching the carion.
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Modern politics is, at bottom, a struggle not of men but of forces. The men become every year more and more creatures of force, massed about central powerhouses. The conflict is no longer between the men, but between the motors that drive the men, and the men tend to succumb to their own motive forces.
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As for America, it is the ideal fruit of all your youthful hopes and reforms. Everybody is fairly decent, respectable, domestic, bourgeois, middle-class, and tiresome. There is absolutely nothing to revile except that it's a bore.
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Practical politics consists in ignoring facts.
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Never esteem anything as of advantage to you that will make you break your word or lose your self-respect.
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The effect of power and publicity on all men is the aggravation of self, a sort of tumor that ends by killing the victim's sympathies.
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Henry James chews more than he bites off.
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Everyone carries his own inch rule of taste, and amuse himself by applying it, triumphantly, wherever he travels.
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In the one branch he most needed
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Morality is a private and costly luxury.
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What one knows is, in youth, of little moment they know enough who know how to learn.
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It is impossible to underrate human intelligence--beginning with one's own.
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Accident counts for much in companionship, as in marriage.
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There is no such thing as an underestimate of average intelligence.
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The best date movies give you something to talk about. A movie that's a downer is a great way to find out about someone.
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No man likes to have his intelligence or good faith questioned, especially if he has doubts about it himself.
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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.
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Politics, as a practice, whatever its professions, has always been the systematic organization of hatreds.
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No one means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous.
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A teacher affects eternity he can never tell, where his influence stops.
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It is impossible to underrate human intelligence -- beginning with one's own.
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A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.
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Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit.
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Accident counts for as much in companionship as in marriage.
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Friends are born, not made.
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Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of facts.
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A friend in power is a friend lost.
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Whatever happens at all happens as it should thou wilt find this true, if thou shouldst watch closely.
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One friend in a lifetime is much two are many three are hardly possible.
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