People From Indiana

"Armadillos make affectionate pets, if you need affection that much."

"The moral of the story of the Pilgrims is that if you work hard all your life and behave yourself every minute and take no time out for fun you will break practically even, if you can borrow enough money to pay your taxes."

"If the Pilgrims were looking for freedom of conscience, they came to just the right place. In America, everybody's conscience is unusually free."

"They [the Pilgrim Fathers] believed in freedom of thought for themselves and for all other people who believed exactly as they did."

"[Footnote] Great men seem to have only one purpose in life — getting into history. That may be all they are good for."

"Captain Smith reached Virginia on April 26, 1607, with a number of English gentlemen and some people who were willing to work. Then they all held a meeting to discuss ways and means of civilizing everybody. They made a great many speeches and accused each other of various crimes and misdemeanors and arrested some of themselves as an object lesson, and American history was started at last."

"Tragabigzanda was a rather large girl. Later on, Captain Smith named a portion of Massachusetts after her. [Footnote: This was afterwards changed to Cape Ann, because you really can't have a part of Massachusetts named Tragabigzanda.]"

"[Footnote] The Mexicans gave the Spaniards malaria, and the Spaniards gave the Mexicans smallpox, whooping cough, diphtheria, and syphilis. The Spaniards believed it was better to give than to receive."

"The Aztecs were very sore, because Montezuma had no business giving the national treasury to every Tom, Dick, and Harry who wanted it. So Montezuma appeared on the roof of the palace and told them that Mexico had definitely turned the corner and everything would be all right from then on if they would just leave it to him. And one of the Aztecs picked up a big rock and hit Montezuma on the head with it, and that was the last of Montezuma II."

"Montezuma had a weak and vacillating nature. He never knew what to do next. [Footnote: He had the courage of his convictions, but he had no convictions.]"

"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."

"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."

"The colonists, it seems, had to "pay taxes to which their consent had never been asked." [Footnote: 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.]"

"She was the most intelligent woman of her day and she refused to get married in nine languages."

"Henry VIII had so many wives because his dynastic sense was very strong whenever he saw a maid of honor."

"The Bayeux Tapestry is accepted as an authority on many details of life and the fine points of history in the eleventh century. For instance, the horses in those days had green legs, blue bodies, yellow manes, and red heads, while the people were all double-jointed and quite different from what we generally think of as human beings."

"The more snuff Frederick took, the more memoirs he wrote. He loved literature, but not enough to let it alone and stop trying to improve it."

"[Footnote] It's easy to see the faults in people, I know; and it's harder to see the good. Especially when the good isn't there."

"In 1740 Frederick became King and wrote a book to prove that lying, cheating, and highway robbery are wrong and that true happiness comes only from helping others. He then took Silesia away from Maria Theresa of Austria, who he had promised to protect, and was called Frederick the Great."

"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."

"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. [Footnote: He had no mistresses, really, but he thought he had. It was all in his head.]"

"Her early years were very unhappy, and she decided she would have a good time if she ever got a chance. Later on, she overdid it a little."

"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."

"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."

"Thenceforth Jeanne's deeper infatuations always seemed to concern gentlemen of a certain age and standing in the financial world. Older men say such interesting things, and Jeanne was always a good listener. Anything you said was news to her."

"As you may be aware, Louis XIV built Versailles, a large, drafty place full of Louis Quatorze furniture and Madame de Montespan."

"The War of the Spanish Succession lasted thirteen years and would have been wonderful if it hadn't been for the Duke of Marlborough. Things went from bad to worse until just about anybody could defeat the French. On one occasion, Louis's favorite regiment was knocked out by a man named Lumley."

"Other kings let their ministers make their mistakes for them, but Louis insisted on making the important mistakes personally."

"Philip [II of Spain] was a great believer in diplomacy, or the art of lying. He fooled some of the people some of the time."

"She [Lucrezia] also had bright yellow hair, which she washed once a week with a mixture of saffron, box shavings, wood ash, barley straw, madder, cumin seed, and one thing and another to bring out the hidden glints and restore its natural color. You left it on your head for twenty-four hours and washed it off with lye made from cabbage stalks, the only hazard of which was the second-degree burn. If your hair remained on the scalp, you were a blonde."

"As for Lucrezia, there wasn't even a rumor in her own day that the strawberries at her Wednesday luncheons were dipped in sugar of lead and the other dishes tastefully sprayed with antimony, hellebore, corrosive sublimate, and deadly nightshade, all popular Renaissance flavors."

"[on the Borgias' illegitimate births] All children are natural, but some are more so than others and are therefore known as natural children."

"Whenever he [Charlemagne] decided to help somebody's morals, people would bury their small change and hide in the swamps and forests."

"Charlemagne's strong point was morals. He was so moral that some people thought he was only fooling. These people came to no good."

"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."

"Charlemagne lived away back in the Dark Ages when people were not very bright. They have been getting brighter and brighter ever since, until finally they are like they are now."

"Attila was now sixtyish. His mind was weakening and he decided to marry again, as he had been terribly misunderstood the first three hundred times."

"[Footnote] At the age of twelve Nero had shown a lively interest in the arts, particularly music, painting, sculpture, and poetry. Why was nothing done about this?"

"In some respects, Nero was ahead of his time. He boiled his drinking water to remove the impurities and cooled it with unsanitary ice to put them back in. He renamed the month of April after himself, calling it Neroneus, but the idea never caught on because April is not Neroneus and there is no use pretending that it is. During his reign of fourteen years, the outlying provinces are said to have prospered. They were farther away."

"[Footnote] The first of Caesar's three marriages — to Cornelia, a very rich girl — resulted tragically. Sylla, Caesar's enemy, confiscated her dowry soon after the wedding."

"He [Julius Caesar] stayed in Egypt from early October until late in June settling affairs of state. It was a boy and they called him Caesarion, or Little Caesar, so Cleopatra now regarded herself as practically engaged. Caesar might have married her, but he had a wife at home. There's always something."

"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."

"Most of the original group [of elephants] succumbed to the climate, and he [Hannibal] was always begging Carthage for more, but the people at home were stingy. They would ask if he thought they were made of elephants and what he had done with the elephants they sent before. Sometimes, when he hadn't an elephant to his name, he would manage to wangle a few from somewhere, a feat which strikes me as his greatest claim to our attention."

"[Footnote] Livy informs us that Hannibal split the huge Alpine rocks with vinegar to break a path for the elephants. Vinegar was a high explosive in 218 B.C., but not before or since."

"Whenever a thousand or so of his men would fall off an Alp, he [Hannibal] would tell the rest to cheer up, the elephants were all right. If someone had given him a shove at the right moment, much painful history might have been avoided."

"Taking elephants across the Alps is not as much fun as it sounds. The Alps are difficult enough when alone, and elephants are peculiarly fitted for not crossing them."

"Then Hamilcar … was drowned in 228 B.C. while crossing a stream with a herd of elephants."

"Hamilcar also told Hannibal about elephants and how you must always have plenty of these clubhouse to scare the enemy. He attributed much of his own success to elephants and believed they would have won the First Punic War for him if things hadn't gone slightly haywire; for the war had turned into a naval affair. But even when the fighting was on land, the Romans did not scare nearly so well as expected. The Romans had learned about elephants while fighting Pyrrhus, whose elephants defeated him in 275 B.C., and even before that, in Alexander's time, King Porus had been undone by his own elephants. Thus, if history had taught any one thing up to that time, it was never to use elephants in war."

"[Footnote] The Phoenicians employed an alphabet of twenty-one consonants. They left no literature. You can't be literary without a few vowels."

"[Footnote] Carthage was governed by its rich men and was therefore a plutocracy. Rome was also governed by its rich men and was therefore a republic."