Jefferson Smith: If you thought as much as being honest as you do of being smart ... Diz: Honest? Why, we're the only ones wh...o can afford to be honest in what we tell the voters. We don't have to be re-elected like politicians.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Jefferson Smith: I hate to stand here and try your patience like this, but either I'm dead right or I'm crazy. Senator MacPhe...rson: You wouldn't care to put that to a vote, would you, Senator?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
For your God of dream or devil You will answer, not to me.... Talk about the pews and steeples And the Cash that goes therewith! But the souls of Christian peoples . . . Chuck it, Smith!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
'Dear Captain Smith,' the ghost replied, 'you've used me ungenteelly. The crowner's quest goes hard with me because I've acte...d frailly, And Parson Biggs won't bury me, though I am dead Miss Bailey.'LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Bill: I think maybe you have to come up with excuses just to avoid the moment of truth. Lili: What?... Bill: In a word, Miss Smith, I think it's just possible you're a virgin.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We have feudal governments in a commercial age. It would be but an easy extension of our commercial system, to pay a private emper...or a fee for services, as we pay an architect, an engineer, or a lawyer. If any man has talent for righting wrong, for administering difficult affairs, for counselling poor farmers how to turn their estates to good husbandry, for combining a hundred private enterprises to a general benefit, let him in the county- town, or in Court-street, put up his sign-board, Mr. Smith, Governor, Mr. Johnson, Working king.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I call her old. She has one family Whose claim is good to being settled here... Before the era of colonization, And before that of exploration even. John Smith remarked them as he coasted by....LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Under a spreading chestnut-tree The village smithy stands;... The smith, a mighty man is he, With large and sinewy hands; And the muscles of his brawny arms Are strong as iron bands.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Except for the beast fables, which are anciently derived from the world's multi-racial heritage, American Negro humor is rooted in... social oppression. And--again excepting the animal fables--it differs from classical Western and white American humor in another respect. It is totally devoid of those myth-making and myth-transmuting elements and symbols that appeal so deeply to the American mind in the works of the tall-tale tellers such as Davy Crockett, Seba Smith, Mike Fink, and Mark Twain. There are no Rip Van Winkles, Johnny Appleseeds, Paul Bunyans, or Calamity Janes--and none bearing the faintest resemblance to them--in Negro American humor. The myth-making figures in the literature of black Americans are the blues-haunted characters. They are Stagolee, John Henry, and Big Boy; they are Mary Lou, Frankie, and Sister Caroline. And they are not funny, least of all to the nameless hundreds of folk-Negroes who created them and the still-living thousands who love them and perpetuate them in song and story.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »