The Church has opposed every innovation and discovery from the day of Galileo down to our own time, when the use of anesthetics in childbirth was regarded as a sin because it avoided the biblical curse pronounced against Eve.

Now when I had mastered the language of this water, and had come to know every trifling feature that bordered the great river as familiarly as I knew the letters of the alphabet, I had made a valuable acquisition. But I had lost something, too. I had lost something which could never be restored me while I lived. All the grace, the beauty, the poetry, had gone out of the majestic river!

I would like to live in Manchester, England. The transition between Manchester and death would be unnoticeable.

...one should be gentle with the ignorant, for they are the chosen of God.

Nothing seems to please a fly so much as to be taken for a currant; and if it can be baked in a cake and palmed off on the unwary, it dies happy.

Not all the Greek runners in the original Olympics were totally naked. Some wore shoes.

My experience with horses is that they never throw away a chance to go lame.