The best lawyers procurable are paid princely sums to study for him the penal code, and legislatures have even revised it for his benefit. Eviction, destruction, suicide and insanity have even trod in his train. A picture of him makes you think of that dark and gloomy canvas where Cæsar, Alexander and Napoleon ride slowly side by side through a sea of stiffened corpses. Bribery, coercion, violence and even murder have been this man's weapons. He is the richest man in America. And yet, as I said in the beginning, all this represents only one side of his nature: he reads his chapter in the Bible each evening by his family fireside, and tenderly kisses his grandchildren good-night.
The individual who imagines that embezzlers are all riotous in nature, and by habit are spendthrifts, does not know humanity. The embezzler is one man; the model citizen another, and yet both souls reside in the one body.
Nero had a passion for pet pigeons, and the birds used to come at his call, perch on his shoulder and take dainty crumbs from his lips.
The natures of some men are divided up into water-tight compartments. Sir Isaac Newton kept his religion in one compartment, and his science in another—they never got together.
Voltaire has said, "When Sir Isaac Newton discovered the Law of Gravitation he excited the envy of the learned men of the world; but they more than got even with him when he wrote a book on the prophecies of the Bible."
hen Newton was only twenty-seven years old he was elected the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Trinity, an office that carried with it a goodly salary and also very much honor. Never before had so young a man held this chair.
Newton was a pioneer in announcing the physical properties of light.
Every village photographer now fully understands this, but when Newton first proclaimed it he created a whirlwind of disapproval.
When a man at that time put forth an unusual thought, it was regarded as a challenge. Teachers and professors all over Great Britain, and also in Germany and France, at once set about to show the fallacy of Newton's conclusions.