Edgar Allan Poe — "I have great faith in fools - self-confidence my friends will call it."

"It is with literature as with law or empire – an established name is an estate in tenure, or a throne in possession."

"I am a good deal of a cynic, and have a good deal of what the world calls misanthropy. But I am not a misanthrope."

"The most 'popular,' the most 'successful' writers among us, (for a brief period, at least) are, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, persons of mere address, perseverance, effrontery—in a word, busy-bo…"

"I have no faith in human perfectibility. I think that human progress is an illusion, that man is not an animal that can be perfected, but an animal that can be improved."

"An agility astounding, a strength superhuman, a ferocity brutal, a butchery without motive, a grotesquerie in horror absolutely alien from humanity..."