Edgar Allan Poe

I have no faith in human perfectability. I think that human exertion will have no appreciable effect upon humanity. Man is now only more active - not more happy - nor more wise, than he was 6000 years ago.

The death of a beautiful woman, is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world.

A strong argument for the religion of Christ is this - that offences against Charity are about the only ones which men on their death-beds can be made - not to understand - but to feel - as crime.

The nose of a mob is its imagination. By this, at any time, it can be quietly led.

All religion, my friend, is simply evolved out of fraud, fear, greed, imagination, and poetry.