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Other countries may boast of this and that, but nobody can touch the United States for poisonous snakes. We have about twenty species, most of them deadly, and Europe has only five or six, none of them much good. We have fifteen kinds of Rattlesnakes alone and nobody else has even one.
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He [Philip II] subdued the Greeks after they had knocked themselves out in the Peloponnesian War and appointed himself Captain General so that he could uphold the ideals of Hellas. The main ideal of Hellas was to get rid of Philip, but he didn't count that one.
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Catherine announced that he died of hemorrhoidal colic, and people who went to the funeral wondered why, in that case, the large bandage was tied around his neck. And that, gentle reader, is what comes from playing with dolls at the wrong time.
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Alexander III of Macedonia was born in 356 B. C., on the sixth day of the month of Lous. He is known as Alexander the Great because he killed more people of more different kinds than any other man of his time. [Footnote: He did this in order to impress Greek culture upon them. Alexander was not strictly a Greek and he was not cultured, but that was his story, and who am I to deny it?]
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He believed you could reach the East by going west. That is true enough, if you don't overdo it. You can reach Long Island City by taking the ferry for Weehawken, but nobody does it on purpose.
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She was the most intelligent woman of her day and she refused to get married in nine languages.
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Borrowing has a bad name, but you would be surprised how it helps in a pinch.
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As Catherine learned later that night [her wedding night], Russia makes strange bedfellows. Peter got into bed with his boots on, played with his collection of dolls for an hour or so, and told the Grand Duchess about his new mistresses. He had no mistresses, really, but he thought he had. It was all in his head.
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The Zebra is striped all over so that the Lion can see him and eat him. Some people say he is striped so that the Lion can not see him. These people believe that the stripes of the Zebra simulate the bars of sunlight falling through the tall jungle grasses and that therefore the Zebra is invisible and that the earth is flat.
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Pericles immediately banished his strongest rival, Cimon, who had achieved popularity by bringing the bones of Theseus, slayer of the Minotaur, back to Athens from the island of Scyros. As Theseus was a myth, he could hardly have had any bones. Nevertheless, Cimon brought them back.
Footnote
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She was one of the victims of the French Revolution, a thing thought up by some philosophers who wished to make the world a better place to live in. They wanted all the French to be free and equal and happy, and they tried to bring this about by decapitating as many of them as possible.
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The Franks had all been German at first, but some of them had taken to eating frogs and snails and were gradually turning into Frenchmen, a fact not generally known at the time because there were no French as yet.
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On the fourth voyage, Columbus sailed along the coast of Central America trying to find the mouth of the Ganges River. It wasn't there, somehow.
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After a while Louis let her [du Barry] draw her own drafts on the comptroller-general. It saved time and bother in a field he much disliked. Jeanne never took more than she needed for urgent current expenses — that is, whatever was in the treasury.
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Egypt has been called the Gift of the Nile. Once every year the river overflows its banks, depositing a layer of rich alluvial soil on the parched ground. Then it recedes and soon the whole countryside, as far as the eye can reach, is covered with Egyptologists.
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The colonists, it seems, had to "pay taxes to which their consent had never been asked." Today we pay taxes but our consent has been asked, and we have told the government to go ahead and tax us all they want to. We like it.
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Henry VIII had so many wives because his dynastic sense was very strong whenever he saw a maid of honor.
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They [Xanthippus, Aristides the Just, and Themistocles] all won lasting renown by constantly accusing one another of peculation and fraud and calling names at election time.
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The Phoenicians employed an alphabet of twenty-one consonants. They left no literature. You can't be literary without a few vowels.
Footnote
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If the Pilgrims were looking for freedom of conscience, they came to just the right place. In America, everybody's conscience is unusually free.
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As the average Athenian citizen was not awfully bright, it was necessary to have a great many of them on each jury. … They did not have to prove that they were completely ignorant before they were accepted as jurymen. That was taken for granted.
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To give the Beaver his due, he does things because he has to do them, not because he believes that hard work per se will somehow make him a better Beaver — the Beaver may be dumb, but he is not that dumb! The Beaver was made to gnaw, and gnaw he does. There you have him in a nutshell.
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A few Cobras in your home will soon clear it of Rats and Mice. Of course, you will still have the Cobras.
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And he [Hannibal] probably believed, up to the very end, that everything might still come out right if he only had a few you-know-whats.
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The stork is voiceless because there is really nothing to say.
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Quote of the day
Ultimately, America's answer to the intolerant man is diversity, the very diversity which our heritage of religious freedom has inspired.
Robert F. Kennedy
Will Cuppy
Born:
August 23, 1884
Died:
September 19, 1949
(aged 65)
Bio:
William Jacob "Will" Cuppy was an American humorist and literary critic, known for his satirical books about nature and historical figures.
Known for:
How to Attract the Wombat (1949)
How to tell your friends from the apes (1931)
How to Become Extinct (1941)
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