Now You Know

No, by the grace of God, you will NOT plead ignorance. You will NOT testify that you never knew any better because no one ever taught you anything better. You will not plead that you were never told.

Thursday, December 16, 2004

Favorite Lines from Novels

Among my favorite lines of all time from a novel are the following ones, which come from Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift. They are lines wherein the King of Brobdingnag tells Gulliver what he has gleaned from Gulliver's accounts of the human race:

As for yourself (continued the King) who has spent the greatest part of your life in travelling, I am well disposed to hope you may hitherto have escaped many vices of your country. But by what I have gathered from your own relation, and the answers I have with much pains wringed and extorted from you, I cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives to be the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth. [Emphasis mine.]

Yep. That's about the size of it.

You've been told and NOW YOU KNOW.