Karel Čapek

“ Sometimes an opponent gets the people on to his side and begins to hold forth on his own; sometimes the crowd divides by a mere splitting and swelling like the lowest organisms and cell colonies. Some clusters are of a firm and steadfast consistency, others perpetually crumble and overflow, increase in size, become distended, multiply or scatter. The larger churches have perambulating pulpits, but most of the orators simply stand on the ground, suck at a moist cigarette and preach about vegetarianism, about God, about education, about reparations, or about spiritualism. ”

“ His adversary was an evolutionary socialist, who had every appearance of being a superior bank clerk. Another group comprised only five members; there was a brown Indian, a one-eyed man wearing a cap, a stout Armenian Jew and two taciturn men with pipes; the one-eyed man declared with a fearful pessimism that “something is sometimes nothing,” while the Indian advocated the more cheerful view that “something is sometimes something,” which he repeated twenty times in very tumbledown English. ”

“ It was a large open space, and anyone who like to, can bring along a chair or a platform or nothing at all, and can start talking. After awhile he has five or twenty or three hundred people listening to him; they answer him, raise objections, nod their heads and some times they join the orator in singing sacred or profane hymns. ”