Will Cuppy Quotes

As Darwin puts it in The Descent of Man, "Male snakes, though appearing so sluggish, are amorous." Isn't that just like Darwin? It was one of his main ideas, you know, that the males of almost all animals have stronger passions than the females. Since then we've learned a thing or two. At any rate, the female snake is right there when spring arrives in the woods.

[Footnote] Great men seem to have only one purpose in life — getting into history. That may be all they are good for.

The more snuff Frederick took, the more memoirs he wrote. He loved literature, but not enough to let it alone and stop trying to improve it.

[Footnote:] To give the Beaver his due, he does things because he has to do them, not because he believes that hard work per se will somehow make him a better Beaver -- the Beaver may be dumb, but he is not that dumb! The Beaver was made to gnaw, and gnaw he does. There you have him in a nutshell.

It's easy to see the faults in people, I know; and it's harder to see the good. Especially when the good isn't there.

The War of the Spanish Succession lasted thirteen years and would have been wonderful if it hadn't been for the Duke of Marlborough. Things went from bad to worse until just about anybody could defeat the French. On one occasion, Louis's favorite regiment was knocked out by a man named Lumley.

Then Hamilcar … was drowned in 228 B.C. while crossing a stream with a herd of elephants.

And he [Hannibal] probably believed, up to the very end, that everything might still come out right if he only had a few you-know-whats.

The Franks had all been German at first, but some of them had taken to eating frogs and snails and were gradually turning into Frenchmen, a fact not generally known at the time because there were no French as yet.

Aristotle described the Crow as chaste. In some departments of knowledge, Aristotle was too innocent for his own good.

The Romans were a nation of homebodies. when they bestirred themselves at all, it was only to go and kill some other Italians.

I think you are absolutely right about everything, except I think humor springs from rage, hay fever, overdue rent and miscellaneous hell.

[Footnote:]Each male has from 2 to 790 females with whom he discusses current events. Of these he marries from 3 to 17.

In modern times much thought has been devoted to the methods used in constructing the Great Pyramid. Egyptologists marvel that such a task could have been accomplished before they were born, and our engineers say they would not have undertaken it with only some old copper tools and a complete lack of stainless steel machinery. It hardly seems possible that the ancient Egyptians were as smart as these experts. Still, they went right ahead and did it, and you can draw your own conclusions. The fact is that building a pyramid is fairly easy, aside from the lifting. You just pile up stones in receding layers, placing one layer carefully upon another, and pretty soon you have a pyramid. You can’t help it.19 And once it is up, it stays there. Why wouldn’t it? In other words, it is not the nature of a pyramid to fall down, and that explains why the Great Pyramid is still standing after all these years.

He [Philip II] subdued the Greeks after they had knocked themselves out in the Peloponnesian War and appointed himself Captain General so that he could uphold the ideals of Hellas. The main ideal of Hellas was to get rid of Philip, but he didn't count that one.