You never need think you can turn over any old falsehood without a
terrible squirming and scattering of the horrid little population
that dwells under it.
- Every real thought on every real subject knocks the wind out of
somebody or other. As soon as his breath comes back, he very
probably begins to expend it in hard words. These are the best
evidence a man can have that he has said something it was time to
say. Dr. Johnson was disappointed in the effect of one of his
pamphlets. "I think I have not been attacked enough for it," he
said;--"attack is the reaction; I never think I have hit hard
unless it rebounds."
- If a fellow attacked my opinions in print would I reply? Not I.
Do you think I don't understand what my friend, the Professor, long
ago called THE HYDROSTATIC PARADOX OF CONTROVERSY?
Don't know what that means?--Well, I will tell you. You know,
that, if you had a bent tube, one arm of which was of the size of a
pipe-stem, and the other big enough to hold the ocean, water would
stand at the same height in one as in the other. Controversy
equalizes fools and wise men in the same way,--AND THE FOOLS KNOW
IT.
- No, but I often read what they say about other people. There are
about a dozen phrases which all come tumbling along together, like
the tongs, and the shovel, and the poker, and the brush, and the
bellows, in one of those domestic avalanches that everybody knows.
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