Bill Nye

“ Is it not that the average American is going to use, and is using, his thinker more than he ever did before? Will not that thinker then, like the muscle of the blacksmith's arm, or the mule's hind foot, grow to a wondrous size as a result? Most assuredly.
The day certainly is not far distant, when the American can not only out-fight, out-row, out-bat, out-run, out-lie, and out-sail all other nationalities; but he will also be able to out-think them. We already point with pride to some of the wonderful thoughts that our leading thinkists, with their thinkers, have thunk. ”

“ I wish that I had time and space to describe some of the beautiful bacteria and gigantic worms that formerly inhabited the earth. Such an aggregation of actual, living Silurian monsters, any one of which would make a man a fortune to-day, if it could be kept on ice and exhibited for one season only. You could take a full grown mastodon to-day, and with no calliope, no lithographs, no bearded lady, no clown with four pillows in his pantaloons and no iron-jawed woman, you could go across this continent and successfully compete with the skating rink. ”

“ Civilization could not have done all this alone. It had to call to its aid the infernal fruit can that now desolates the most obscure trail in the heart of the mountains. You walk over chaos where the “hydraulic” has plowed up the valley like a convulsion, or you tread the yielding path across the deserted dump, and on all sides the rusty, neglected and humiliated empty tin can stares at you with its monotonous, dude-like stare. ”

“ It is all we have to remind us of royalty in America, with the exception, perhaps, of the case now and then where a king full busts a bob-tail flush.
A Mountain Snowstorm.
September does not always indicate golden sunshine, and ripening corn, and old gold pumpkin pies on the half-shell. We look upon it as the month of glorious perfection in the handiwork of the seasons and the time when the ripened fruits are falling; when the red sun hides behind the bronze and misty evening, and says good night with reluctance to the beautiful harvests and the approaching twilight of the year. ”

“ There, in the midst of a great city, with the hum of industry and the low rumble of the throbbing Boston brain dimly heard in the distance, nature asserts herself, and the weary, sad-eyed stranger may ramble for hours and keep off the grass to his heart's content. ”

“ With the moist and misty spring, with the pink and white columbine of the wildwood and the breath of the cellar and the incense of burning overshoes in the back yard, comes the little barefoot boy with fawn colored hair and a droop in his pantaloons. Poverty is not the grand difficulty with the little barefoot boy of spring. It is the wild, ungovernable desire to wiggle his toes in the ambient air, and to soothe his parboiled heels in the yielding mud. ”

“ A man may slumber on softly with his bosom gently rising and falling, and his breath coming and going through one corner of his mouth like the death rattle of a bath-tub, while the pastor opens out a new box of theological thunders and fills the air full of the sullen roar of sulphurous waves, licking the shores of eternity and swallowing up the great multitudes of the eternally lost ”

“ I would rather discover how to successfully wean a calf from the parent stem without being boosted over a nine rail fence, than to discover a new star that had never been used, and the next evening find that it had made an assignment.
Boys, oh, boys! How I wish I could take each of you by the ear and lead you away by yourselves, and show you how many ruins strew the road to success, and how life is like a mining boom. We only hear of those who strike it rich. ”

“ It is the place where it is a positive disadvantage to be born wealthy. And yet, sometimes I wish they had experimented a little that way on me. I do not ask now to be born rich, of course, because it is too late; but it seems to me that, with my natural good sense and keen insight into human nature, I could have struggled along under the burdens and cares of wealth with great success. I do not care to die wealthy, but if I could have been born wealthy, it seems to me I would have been tickled almost to death. ”

“ Why should we pat the new subscriber on the back, and give him a new album that will fall to pieces whenever you laugh in the same room? Why should you forget the old love for the new? Do we not often impose on the old subscriber by giving up the space he has paid for to flaming advertisements to catch the coy and skittish gudgeon who still lurks outside the fold? Do we not ofttimes offer a family Bible for a new subscriber when an old subscriber may be in a lost and undone state? ”

“ Visscher ordered in a powerful cocktail to give him courage, and then he tried to carve off some of the breast.
The lobster is honery even in death. He is eccentric and trifling. Those who know him best are the first to evade him and shun him. Visscher had failed to straddle the wish bone with his fork properly, and the talented bird of the deep rolling sea slipped out of the platter, waved itself across the horizon twice, and buried itself in the bosom of the eminent and talented young man. ”

“ The earth is convulsed with a universal sob, and the roads are muddy with tears. But I do not call to mind a more touching picture of unavailing misery and ruin, and hopeless chaos, than the plug hat that has endeavored to keep sober and maintain self-respect while its owner was drunk. A plug hat can stand prosperity, and shine forth joyously while nature smiles. That's the place where it seems to thrive. A tall silk hat looks well on a thrifty man with a clean collar, but it cannot stand dissipation. ”

“ When a fellow-being has to be smothered, as was the case the other day right here in our fair land, a land where tyrant foot hath never trod nor bigot forged a chain, we look anxiously into each other's faces and inquire, what shall we do?
Shall we go to France at a great expense and fill our systems full of dog virus and then return to our glorious land, where we may fork over that virus to posterity and thus mix up French hydrophobia with the navy-blue blood of free-born American citizens? ”

“ The American Indian approximates nearer to what man should be—manly, physically perfect, grand in character, and true to the instincts of his conscience—than any other race of beings, civilized or uncivilized. Where do we hear such noble sentiments or meet with such examples of heroism and self-sacrifice as the history of the American Indian furnishes? Where shall we go to hear again such oratory as that of Black Hawk and Logan? Certainly the records of our so-called civilization do not furnish it, and the present century is devoid of it. ”

“ Phrenology is a good thing, no doubt, if we can purify it. So long as it does not become the slave of capital, there is nothing about phrenology that is going to do harm; but when it becomes the creature of the trade dollar, it looks as though the country would be filled up with wild-eyed genius that hasn't had a square meal for two weeks. The time will surely come when America will demand less statesmanship and more flour; when less statistics and a purer, nobler and more progressive style of beefsteak will demand our attention. ”

“ Yielding at last to the great desire for possessions and property the somnambulist groped his way to the corral of a total stranger, and selecting a choice mule with great dewy eyes and real camel's hair tail, he fled. On and on he pressed, toward the dark, uncertain west, till at last rosy morn clomb the low, outlying hills and gilded the gray outlines of the sage-brush. The coyote slunk back to his home, but the somnambulist did not. ”

“ Then, when the season is over, we will come back into the great maelstrom of life, he to wait for his grandmother's overshoes and I to thrill waiting millions from the rostrum with my “Tale of the Broncho Cow.” And so it goes with us all. Adown life's rugged pathway some must toil on from daylight to dark to earn their meagre pittance as kings, while others are born to wear a swallow-tail coat every evening and wring tears of genuine anguish from their audiences. ”

“ One who has never experienced the thrill of genuine joy that wakens a man to a glad realization of the fact that he is a forefather, cannot understand its full significance. You alone know how it is yourself, you can speak from experience.
In fancy's dim corridors I see you stand, away back in the early dawn of our national day, with the tallow candle drooping and dying in its socket, as you waited for the physician to come and announce to you that you were a forefather. ”

“ And what can be more beautiful, as it calmly lies in its bower of green vines in the crisp and golden haze of autumn, than the cute little crook-neck squash, with yellow, warty skin, all cuddled up together in the cool morning, like the discarded wife of an old Mormon elder—his first attempt in the matrimonial line, so to speak, ere he had gained wisdom by experience. ”

“ I need not elaborate upon the wonderful growth of the press in our country, or refer to the great power which journalism wields in the development of the new world. I need not ladle out statistics to show you how the newspaper has encroached upon the field of oratory and how the pale and silent man, while others sleep, compiles the universal history of a day and tells his mighty audience what he thinks about it before he goes to bed. ”

“ In those days the Roman girl had nothing to do but live a pure and blameless life, so that she could marry a shattered Roman rake who had succeeded in shunning a blameless life himself, and at last, when he was sick of all kinds of depravity and needed a good, careful wife to take care of him, would come with his dappled, sin-sick soul and shattered constitution, and his vast acquisitions of debts, and ask to be loved by a noble young woman. Nothing pleased a blase Roman so well as to have a young and beautiful girl, with eyes like liquid night, to take the job of reforming him. ”

“ Where did you go to find a woman who could be your inferior and still keep out of the menagerie? Adelbert, I fear you do your wife a great injustice. With just barely enough vitality to hand your name down to posterity and blast the fair future of Dakota by leaving your trade-mark on future generations, you snivel and whine over your blasted life! If your life had been blasted a little harder twenty years ago, the life of your miserable little wife would have been less blasted.
If you had acquired a little more croup twenty years ago, Dakota would have been ahead. ”

“ Why did trade and emigration turn their backs upon Babylon and seek out Minneapolis, St. Paul, Kansas City and Omaha? Was it because they were blest with a bluer sky or a more genial sun? Not by any means. While Babylon lived upon what she had been and neglected to advertise, other towns with no history extending back into the mouldy past, whooped with an exceeding great whoop and tore up the ground and shed printers' ink and showed marked signs of vitality. That is the reason that Babylon is no more.
This life of ours is one of intense activity. ”

“ I dislike very much to speak to you in a plain, blunt way, Adelbert, being a total stranger to you, but when you convey the idea in your letter that you have made a great mistake in marrying at the age of nineteen, and marrying far beneath yourself, I am forced to agree with you. If, instead of marrying a young girl who didn't know any better than to believe that you were a man, instead of a fractional one, you had come to me, and borrowed my revolver and blown out the fungus growth which you refer to as your brains, you would have bit it. ”

“ The name of George Washington has always had about it a glamour that made him appear more in the light of a god than a tall man with large feet and a mouth made to fit an old-fashioned, full-dress pumpkin pie. ”