Mudbringer

Hi, I mostly participate on wikisource; please see my user page there. I want to begin adding content to this site, but I need to spend some time looking around to figure out what goes where. I'm a little unclear on when it's better to add a quote to the page for the author, or to the page for the subject. For now I'll start listing some quotable bits I've come across on wikisource.

Candidate quotes

• The one drawback to American hospitality is that it is apt to be too profuse. I have more than once had to offer a mild protest against being entertained by a hard-working brother journalist on a scale that would have befitted a millionaire. The possibility of returning the compliment in kind affords the canny Scot but poor consolation. A dinner three times more lavish and expensive than you want is not sweetened by the thought that you may, in turn, give your host a dinner three times more expensive and lavish than he wants. Both parties, on this system, suffer in digestion and in pocket, while only Delmonico is the gainer. It seems to me, on the whole, that in this country the millionaire is too commonly allowed to fix the standard of expenditure. Society would not be less, but more, agreeable if, instead of always emulating the splendours of Lucullus, people now and then studied the art of Horatian frugality. And I note that in club life, if the plutocrat sets the standard of expenditure, the aristocrat looks to the training of the servants. Their obsequiousness is almost painful. There is not the slightest trace of democratic equality in their dress, their manners, or their speech.
  • William Archer (translator of Henrik Ibsen), America To-Day, Observations & Reflections, Letter VII, p. 72-73.
    • Possibly appropriate for Social inequality.

• Designing to take a strong fort, which the scouts told him was exceeding difficult and impregnable, he asked whether it was so difficult that an ass could not come at it laden with gold.
  • about Philip II of Macedon, by Plutarch, Moralia source