Status Updates From The Devil's Dictionary, Tal...

...an aunt of mine–a good old lady who had brought me up by hand and taught me many wholesome lessons in morality, which in my later life have proved of extreme value. Foremost among these I mention her solemn and oft-repeated injunction never to tell a lie without a definite and specific reason for doing so.

…he finally wrote that he had decided to call the new journal The Lantern…obviously borrowed from M. Rochefort’s famous journal, La Lanterne…the name could hardly be agreeable to Mr. Mortimer’s Imperialist friends…I was delighted to promise, however, that the new paper should resemble the old in one particular: it should be irritatingly disrespectful of existing institutions and exalted personages.

In power upon the emotions nothing, I think, is comparable to a first sight of mountains. To a member of the plains-tribe, born and reared on the flats of Ohio or Indiana, a mountain region was a perpetual miracle.