Midwifery should be taught in the same course with fencing and boxing, riding and rowing. - Herman Melville

To be enraged with a dumb thing, Captain Ahab, seems blasphemous.

Our souls are like those orphans whose unwedded mothers die in bearing them: the secret of our paternity lies in their grave, and we must there to learn it.

In war-time on the field or in the fleet, a mortal punishment decreed by a drum-head court — on the field sometimes decreed by but a nod from the General — follows without delay on the heel of conviction without appeal.