In some respects, Nero was ahead of his time. He boiled his drinking water to remove the impurities and cooled it with unsanitary ice to put them back in. He renamed the month of April after himself, calling it Neroneus, but the idea never caught on because April is not Neroneus and there is no use pretending that it is. During his reign of fourteen years, the outlying provinces are said to have prospered. They were farther away.

Unfortunately, this world is full of people who are ready to think the worst when they see a man sneaking out of the wrong bedroom in the middle of the night.

Caesar might have married Cleopatra, but he had a wife at home. There’s always something.

Whenever a kangaroo puts his paws on your shoulder and gives you a big grin, that is the time to leave.

Whales are silly once every two years. The young are called short-heads or baby blimps. Many whale romances begin in Baffin’s bay and end in Procter and Gamble’s factory, Staten Island.

Galvani was mistaken about the amount of electricity in frogs, but he had some good ideas, too, for the galvanometer is named in his honor, and you don’t have galvanometers named after you merely for making a mistake about a frog.

Even as a child back in Indiana, whenever I took a Butterbelly off the hook I used to ask myself, “Does this fish think?” I would even ask others, “Do you suppose this Butterbelly can think?” And all I would get in reply was a look. At the age of eighteen, I left the state.

I borrow to pay my honest debts and not to squander foolishly. What’s more, I confine my borrowing to those who can well afford it. I don’t go around sponging on widows and orphans unless they have plenty.

It’s easy to see the faults in people I know; it’s hardest to see the good. Especially when the good isn’t there.

The Ancient Egyptians considered it good luck to meet a swarm of Bees on the road. What they considered bad luck I couldn’t say.