A serious prophet upon predicting a flood should be the first man to climb a tree. - Stephen Crane

I like the people. But, considered generally, they are a collection of ingenious blockheads.

With the conviction came a store of assurance. He felt a quiet manhood, non-assertive but of sturdy and strong blood. He knew that he would no more quail before his guides wherever they should point. He had been to touch the great death, and found that, after all, it was but the great death. He was a man.

He was submitting, submitting because of his fathers, bending his mind in a most perfect slavery to this conflagration.