quotes from classic

Annual plants are nature's emergency medical service, seeded in sounds and scars to hold the land until the perennial cover is re-established.

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The primary motive for good care and good use of the land-community is always going to be affection, which is too often lacking.

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Bats have no bankers and they do not drink and cannot be arrested and pay no tax and, in general, bats have it made.

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Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.

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Incompatibility. In matrimony a similarity of tastes, particularly the taste for domination.

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Rum, n. Generically, fiery liquors that produce madness in total abstainers.

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Dog - a kind of additional or subsidiary Deity designed to catch the overflow and surplus of the world's worship.

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Amnesty, n. The state's magnanimity to those offenders whom it would be too expensive to punish.

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Impartial - unable to perceive any promise of personal advantage from espousing either side of a controversy.

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Enthusiasm - a distemper of youth, curable by small doses of repentance in connection with outward applications of experience.

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Future. That period of time in which our affairs prosper, our friends are true and our happiness is assured.

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Impiety. Your irreverence toward my deity.

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Curiosity, n. An objectionable quality of the female mind. The desire to know whether or not a woman is cursed with curiosity is one of the most active and insatiable passions of the masculine soul.

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Witticism. A sharp and clever remark, usually quoted and seldom noted; what the Philistine is pleased to call a joke.

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Alliance - in international politics, the union of two thieves who have their hands so deeply inserted in each other's pockets that they cannot separately plunder a third.

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Erudition - dust shaken out of a book into an empty skull.

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Experience - the wisdom that enables us to recognise in an undesirable old acquaintance the folly that we have already embraced.

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Eloquence, n. The art of orally persuading fools that white is the color that it appears to be. It includes the gift of making any color appear white.

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Optimism - the doctrine or belief that everything is beautiful, including what is ugly.

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Compromise, n. Such an adjustment of conflicting interests as gives each adversary the satisfaction of thinking he has got what he ought not to have, and is deprived of nothing except what was justly his due.

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