You aim for the palace and get drowned in the sewer.

I told you this would happen. But, no, you had to go for the buffet, didn't you?

Hain't we got all the fools in town on our side? And hain't that a big enough majority in any town?

Often it does seem a pity that Noah and his party did not miss the boat.

... No photograph ever was good, yet, of anybody - hunger and thirst and utter wretchedness overtake the outlaw who invented it! It transforms into desperadoes the weakest of men; depicts sinless innocence upon the pictured faces of ruffians; gives the wise man the stupid leer of a fool, and the fool an expression of more than earthly wisdom.

Heaven knows insanity was disreputable enough, long ago; but now that the lawyers have got to cutting every gallows rope and picking every prison lock with it, it is become a sneaking villainy that ought to hang and keep on hanging its sudden possessors until evil-doers should conclude that the safest plan was to never claim to have it until they came by it legitimately. The very calibre of the people the lawyers most frequently try to save by the insanity subterfuge ought to laugh the plea out of the courts, one would think.

I was a-trembling, because I'd got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it.