"When my grandfather was born there were barely two thousand people living in the capital; in my own childhood there were nearly five thousand. In grandfather's childhood the only people who counted were a few government officials and a few foreign merchants, mainly Jews from Schleswig and Holstein who spoke Low German and called themselves Danes . . . The rest of the town's inhabitants were cottagers who went out to the fishing and sometimes owned a small share in a cow, or had a few sheep. They had little rowing-boats, on which they could sometimes hoist a sail."

"The belief that the body of the Virgin was not interred on earth, but was taken to heaven, has deprived them of all pretext for manufacturing any relics of her remains, which otherwise might have been…"

"My fellow immigrants, my fellow Americans how do you know if you are a Republican? I’ll tell you how. If you believe that government should be accountable to the people, not the people to the governme…"

"Things of real worth, such as the mental life of the ant or the crab, fill psychological and scientific literature; but such a thing as death, which involves the whole human race more intimately than …"

"Then I knew that the last test of sanity had failed me, for it was no longer possible to tell the unreal from the real. The last test fails when the illusion moves into life itself and you can touch a…"