If you should put a knife into a French girl's learning it would explode and blow away like an omelette soufflee.

... anything so delightful as Washington I have never seen elsewhere. There were a mingled simplicity and grandeur, a mingled state and quiet intimacy, a brilliancy of conversation--the proud prominence of intellect over material prosperity which does not exist in any other city of the Union.

To look at and properly appreciate the British Museum is the work of a lifetime.

English people ... are very kind, very friendly, interested in a general way, and consider us a great, wonderful, unknown sort of Australia, and that is all.

... the English are very fond of being entertained, and ... they regard the French and the American people as destined by Heaven to amuse them.

Washington society has always demanded less and given more than any society in this country--demanded less of applause, deference,etiquette, and has accepted as current coin quick wit, appreciative tact, and a talent for talking.

The young women, what can they not learn, what can they not achieve, with Columbia University annex thrown open to them? In this great outlook for women's broader intellectual development I see the great sunburst of the future.

The poor are always ragged and dirty, in very picturesque clothes, and on their poor shoes lies the earth of the Lacustrine period. And yet what a privilege it is to be even a beggar in Rome!

I did not find Liverpool ugly. Her stately public buildings, broad streets, public squares, and noble statues redeem her from the charge.

War is a most uneconomical, foolish, poor arrangement, a bloody enrichment of that soil which bears the sweet flower of peace.

...I think the Americans are the only people who have good beds. I consider the American bedroom unparalleled for freshness, comfort, and cleanliness. It is worth going all over Europe in order to come home to one's own bed.

Westminster Abbey is nature crystallized into a conventional form by man, with his sorrows, his joys, his failures, and his seeking for the Great Spirit. It is a frozen requiem, with a nation's prayer ever in dumb music ascending.

How often the Presidency has simply meant that a man shall be abused, distrusted, and worked to death while he is filling the great office, and that he should drop into unmerited oblivion when he has left the White House.

The American is said to become full-flavored, and in time a most all-round man, through the polish which Europe can impart.

This habit of free speaking at ladies' lunches has impaired society it has doubtless led to many of the tragedies of divorce and marital unhappiness. Could society be deaf and dumb and Congress abolished for a season, what a happy and peaceful life one could lead!

The House of Lords, architecturally, is a magnificent room, and the dignity, quiet, and repose of the scene made me unwillingly acknowledge that the Senate of the United States might possibly improve its manners. Perhaps in our desire for simplicity, absence of title, or badge of office we may have thrown over too much.