People ought to start dead and then they would be honest so much earlier.

We never become really and genuinely our entire and honest selves until we are dead / and not then until we have been dead years and years. People ought to start dead and then they would be honest so much earlier.

None but the dead have free speech. None but the dead are permitted to speak truth.

We must annex those people. We can afflict them with our wise and beneficent government. We can introduce the novelty of thieves, all the way up from street-car pickpockets to municipal robbers and Government defaulters, and show them how amusing it is to arrest them and try them and then turn them loose -- some for cash and some for ''political influence.'' We can make them ashamed of their simple and primitive justice. We can make that little bunch of sleepy islands the hottest corner on earth, and array it in the moral splendor of our high and holy civilization. Annexation is what the poor islanders need. ''Shall we to men benighted, the lamp of life deny?''

I will say this much for the nobility: that, tyrannical, murderous, rapacious and morally rotten as they were, they were deeply and enthusiastically religous. Nothing could divert them from the regular and faithful performace of the pieties enjoined by the Church.

The way it is now, the asylums can hold all the sane people but if we tried to shut up the insane we should run out of building materials