“Think what you would have been now, if instead of being fed with tales and old wives' fables in childhood, you had been crammed with geography and natural history!”

“I had been fed, in my youth, a lot of old wives' tales about the way men would instantly forsake a beautiful woman to flock around a brilliant one. It is but fair to say that, after getting out in the world, I had never seen this happen."[From a column dated November 17, 1928]”

“The man who has fed the chicken every day throughout its life at last wrings its neck instead, showing that more refined views as to the uniformity of nature would have been useful to the chicken.”

“I don't know if any of this would have happened if we had been at home... Would we have crammed ourselves into the bathroom of a San Francisco restaurant to play her song? I doubt it. There's something about distance, being removed from what's familiar, that let's things happen.”

“Earthlings went on being friendly, when they should have been thinking instead.”

“I often wonder what would have happened to those in pain if, instead of Christ, there had been a Christian.”