Gunpowder Quotes

You're right." He cut me off. "I never understood this country. I never understood why he chose to leave everything else behind and stay for this. Not until I met you."
I felt like he'd pushed me, like I was falling and I needed him to reel those words back in to keep me standing straight.
"You /are/ this country, Amani." He spoke more quietly now. "More alive than anything ought to be in this place. All fire and gunpowder, with one finger always on the trigger. ~ Alwyn Hamilton

I will lay thy stones with fair colors (Isa. 54:11).

The stones from the wall said, "We come from the mountains far away, from the sides of the craggy hills. Fire and water have worked on us for ages, but made us only crags. Human hands have made us into a dwelling where the children of your immortal race are born, and suffer, and rejoice, and find rest and shelter, and learn the lessons set them by our Maker and yours. But we have passed through much to fit us for this. Gunpowder has rent our very heart; pickaxes have cleaved and broken us, it seemed to us often with out design or meaning, as we lay misshapen stones in the quarry; but gradually we were cut into blocks, and some of us were chiseled with finer instruments to a sharper edge. But we are complete now, and are in our places, and are of service.

"You are in the quarry still, and not complete, and therefore to you, as once to us, much is inexplicable. But you are destined for a higher building, and one day you will be placed in it by hands not human, a living stone in a heavenly temple."

In the still air the music lies unheard;In the rough marble beauty hides unseen;
To make the music and the beauty needs
The master's touch, the sculptor's chisel keen.
Great Master, touch us with Thy skillful hands;
Let not the music that is in us die!
Great Sculptor, hew and polish us; nor let,
Hidden and lost, thy form within us lie! ~ Mrs. Charles E. Cowman

For the space of half a year, the gunpowder lay as harmless as sand, because no fire came near to explode it. ~ Emily Bronte

[The imagination] ... inspires an audacious mental habit. We are as elastic as the gas of gunpowder, and ... a word dropped in conversation, sets free our fancy, and instantly our heads are bathed with galaxies, and our feet tread the floor of the Pit. ~ Marsilio Ficino

All civilization in a sense exists only in the mind. Gunpowder, textile arts, machinery, laws, telephones are not themselves transmitted from man to man or from generation to generation, at least not permanently. It is the perception, the knowledge and understanding of them, their ideas in the Platonic sense, that are passed along. Everything social can have existence only through mentality. ~ Alfred L. Kroeber

These inventions became, incidentally, increasingly revolting to me, for I was ineradicably marked by a touch of the old cavalryman's primitive evaluation. I admit that in the earliest times the horseman had a considerable advantage over the foot soldier. (On the other hand considerably higher expenses were involved.) But the advantage was balanced by the invention of gunpowder, so rightly lamented by Ariosto. It was the end of glorious armies like those led by Charles the Bold. Cavalry charges still took place of course – and I cannot consider it unfair for the infantryman to load and fire two or three times before he received his comeuppance – but after that, death came to the cavalry.

The old Centaurs were overpowered by the new Titan. I had seen my own conqueror at close hand when I lay bleeding on the grass. He had unhorsed me – a sickly fellow, a pimply lad from the suburbs, some cutler from Sheffield or weaver from Manchester. He cowered behind his rubble heap, one eye shut, the other aiming at me across the machine gun, which did the damage. In a pattern of red and gray, he wove an evil cloth. This was the new Polyphemus or, rather, one of his lowest messenger boys with a wire mask before his one-eyed face. This was how the present masters looked. The beauty of the forests was past. ~ Ernst Junger

In recent times, European nations, with the use of gunpowder and other technical improvements in warfare, controlled practically the whole world. One, the British Empire, brought under one government a quarter of the earth and its inhabitants. ~ John Boyd Orr

The Chinese had gunpowder, but it didn't occur to them to put it in a gun. They possessed the compass but didn't go anywhere. They invented paper, printing, and a written form of their language, but hardly anyone in China was taught to read. ~ P. J. O'Rourke

There was no response. Soon afterward, a skiff flying the Spanish flag approached the Charleston. Two Spanish officers came aboard and apologized for not having returned the American "salute" because they had no gunpowder left in their arsenal. It turned out that they had not been resupplied for months and did not know the United States and Spain were at war. The next morning an American lieutenant went ashore. At 10:15 he handed the Spanish commandant a message demanding surrender of the island within thirty minutes. The commandant retired to his quarters. Twenty-nine minutes later he emerged with a reply. "Being without defenses of any kind and without any means for meeting the present situation," he had written, "I am under the sad necessity of being unable to resist such superior forces and regretfully accede to your demands. ~ Stephen Kinzer

We were born between blood and gunpowder; and between blood and gunpowder we were raised. Every so often the powerful from other lands came to rob us of tomorrow. For this reason it was written in a war song that unites us: "If a foreigner with his step ever dares to profane your land, think, Oh beloved motherland, that heaven gave you a soldier in each son." For this reason we fought. With flags and different languages the foreigner came to conquer us. He came and he went. ~ Subcomandante Marcos

There is no harm in anybody thinking that Christ is in bread. The harm is in the expectation of His presence in gunpowder. ~ John Ruskin

I come from a family that has been here for almost 200 years. My ancestors started a very dangerous gunpowder business in 1802, and my great- grandfather and his father were both killed in gunpowder explosions. ~ Pete Du Pont

What do nations care about the cost of war, if by spending a few hundred millions in steel and gunpowder they can gain a thousand millions in diamonds and cocoa? ~ W.E.B. Du Bois

Such I hold to be the genuine use of Gunpowder: that it makes all men tall. ~ Thomas Carlyle

GUY FAWKES; OR, A COMPLETE HISTORY OF THE GUNPOWDER TREASON, A.D. 1605; WITH A DEVELOPEMENT OF THE PRINCIPLES OF THE CONSPIRATORS, AND SOME NOTICES OF THE REVOLUTION OF 1688. BY THE REV. THOMAS LATHBURY, M.A., ~ Thomas Lathbury

When they rolled to a stop, she found herself pinned by a tremendous, huffing weight. And pierced by an intense green gaze.
"Wh-?" Her breath rushed out in question.
Boom, the world answered.
Susanna ducked her head, burrowing into the protection of what she'd recognized to be an officer's coat. The knob of a brass button pressed into her cheek. The man's bulk formed a comforting shield as a shower of dirt clods rained down on them both. He smelled of whiskey and gunpowder.
After the dust cleared, she brushed the hair from his brow, searching his gaze for signs of confusion or pain. His eyes were alert and intelligent, and still that startling shade of green-as hard and richly hued as jade.
She asked, "Are you well?"
"Yes." His voice was a deep rasp. "Are you?"
She nodded, expecting him to release her at the confirmation. When he showed no signs of moving, she puzzled at it. Either he was gravely injured or seriously impertinent. "Sir, you're…er, you're rather heavy." Surely he could not fail to miss that hint.
He replied, "You're soft."
Good Lord. Who was this man? Where had he come from? And how was he still atop her?
"You have a small wound." With trembling fingers, she brushed a reddish knot high on his temple, near his hairline. "Here." She pressed her hand to his throat, feeling for his pulse. She found it, thumping strong and steady against her gloved fingertips.
"Ah. That's nice."
Her face blazed with heat. " ~ Tessa Dare

Old-time ranchers planted cheatgrass because it would green up fast in the spring and provide early forage for grazing cattle," Oyster says, nodding his head at the world outside.

This first patch of cheatgrass was in southern British Columbia, Canada, in 1889. But fire spreads it. Every year, it dries to gunpowder, and now land that used to burn every ten years, it burns every year. And the cheatgrass recovers fast. Cheatgrass loves fire. But the native plants, the sagebrush and desert phlox, they don't. And every year it burns, there's more cheatgrass and less anything else. And the deer and antelope that depended on those other plants are gone now. So are the rabbits. So are the hawks and owls that ate the rabbits. The mice starve, so the snakes that ate the mice starve.

Today, cheatgrass dominates the inland deserts from Canada to Nevada, covering an area over twice the size of the state of Nebraska and spreading by thousands of acres per year.

The big irony is, even cattle hate cheatgrass, Oyster says. So the cows, they eat the rare native bunch grasses. What's left of them...

"When you think about it from a native plant perspective," Oyster says, "Johnny Appleseed was a fucking biological terrorist."

Johnny Appleseed, he says, might as well be handing out smallpox. ~ Chuck Palahniuk

He wondered what she would taste of - fantasized about how gunpowder and scorched earth would weigh on his tongue. ~ Vanessa Gravenstein

They fought their first action in March of 1775. Embarked on eight small ships, they sailed to the Bahamas and captured a British fort near Nassau, seizing gunpowder and supplies. Later, during the Revolutionary War, Marines fought several engagements in their distinctive green coats, such as helping George Washington to cross the Delaware River, and assisting John Paul Jones on the Bonhomme Richard to capture the British frigate Serapis during their famous sea fight. ~ Tom Clancy

On November 5 he landed at Torbay, on the coast of Devon. Reminded that it was the anniversary of the Gunpowder Plot, he remarked to Burnet, What do you think of Predestination now? ~ Winston S. Churchill

I had been right: freedom smelled like ozone and thunderstorms and gunpowder all at once, like snow and bonfires and cut grass, it tasted like seawater and oranges. ~ Tana French

Once I made weapons carved from stone, I tied the weight to a wooden handle, a club to break the bones of my enemy.

Then I became wiser...
and sharpened the stone to a point and then fastened it to a stick; my arrow. I bent wood and hitched string to it; my bow. I kill my enemy with skill

Then I became wiser...
and made weapons forged from steel and took care to sharpen the blade of my sword. I kill my enemy with a stroke.

Then I became wiser...
and made the rifle that would, by exploding gunpowder, shoot balls of lead faster than the eye could see. I kill my enemy with but the pull of a trigger.

Then I became wiser...
and I built flying machine that could transport bombs to drop over the homes of my enemy. I kill my enemy from the sky.

Then I became wiser...
and created the drone, now I can guide a plane by remote control from one country and kill my enemy in another. I am a proficient killer

Then I became wiser...
and I found a way to split the atom and found the power of God hidden within. I kill the ground, scorch the sky, pollute the wind and kill my enemy with the push of a button.

Then I became wiser...
And I found that there is nothing more foolish than a "Wise Man of War ~ Tonny K. Brown

You can't stop things like Bitcoin. [ ... ]. It's like trying to stop gunpowder. ~ John McAfee

By his machines man can dive and remain under water like a shark; can fly like a hawk in the air; can see atoms like a gnat; can see the system of the universe of Uriel, the angel of the sun; can carry whatever loads a ton of coal can lift; can knock down cities with his fist of gunpowder; can recover the history of his race by the medals which the deluge, and every creature, civil or savage or brute, has involuntarily dropped of its existence; and divine the future possibility of the planet and its inhabitants by his perception of laws of nature. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

The nouvelle cuisine of anarchy. Barium nitrate in a sauce of sulfur and garnished with charcoal. That's your basic gunpowder. Bon appetit. ~ Chuck Palahniuk

She was all fire and gunpowder, and her finger was always on a trigger ~ Alwyn Hamilton

All her life she'd been warned that men were slaves to their desires, that they held their impulses in barely controlled check. A woman
a lady
must be very, very careful of her actions so she did not put spark to the gunpowder that was a man's libido. ~ Elizabeth Hoyt

Imagine, with John Lennon, a world with no religion. Imagine no suicide bombers, no 9/11, no 7/7, no Crusades, no witch-hunts, no Gunpowder Plot, no Indian partition, no Israeli/Palestinian wars, no Serb/Croat/Muslim massacres, no persecution of Jews as 'Christ-killers', no Northern Ireland 'troubles', no 'honour killings', no shiny-suited bouffant-haired televangelists fleecing gullible people of their money ('God wants you to give till it hurts'). Imagine no Taliban to blow up ancient statues, no public beheadings of blasphemers, no flogging of female skin for the crime of showing an inch of it. ~ Richard Dawkins

In 2012 about 56 million people died throughout the world; 620,000 of them died due to human violence (war killed 120,000 people, and crime killed another 500,000). In contrast, 800,000 committed suicide, and 1.5 million died of diabetes.23 Sugar is now more dangerous than gunpowder. ~ Yuval Noah Harari

Peter lifted his head. Hook's hair was tangled around his face like a lion's mane and his eyes were painfully clear, all teasing and mirth gone from his mouth.
He took Peter's chin in his hand, his fingers calloused but gentle, and kissed him.
Everything in the world grew quiet and Peter's body grew loud. The caress of Hook's fingertips under his chin made his pulse catch, his throat flushing, shoulders tightening. He could only seem to breathe in, breathe Hook in deeper. Hook's lips were dry, and he tasted like salt and sweet wine. He smelled like gunpowder and the sea and he was everywhere, shifting closer across the leaves, his other arm snaking around Peter's waist, the iron claw pressed flat between his shoulder blades.
Peter dug his fingers into fistfuls of earth, trying to ground himself as Hook pulled them together, tipping Peter's head back with the gentle thrust of his kiss, a momentum that threatened to tilt them both to the ground. Peter was impossibly hot, hot to his fingertips and toes and his skin was crawling with the need to be touched, the shock of that need.
Sweat caught at the back of his shirt. His skin was stark canvas begging for ink, and Hook's touch was going to stain him forever. It was too much, too sudden. Peter recoiled, yanking a knife from his boot and holding it between them. He didn't mean it as a threat, just a way to make distance where none had been. ~ Austin Chant

The strength of the people is effective only if it is concentrated; it evaporates and is lost when it is dispersed, just as gunpowder scattered on the ground ignites only grain by grain. ~ Jean-Jacques Rousseau

In the war I once drove a gunpowder cart down a mountain," declared Black. "The cart aflame. Lightning
striking to left and right. Knife in teeth. One hand on the reins, the other firing a pistol. French dragoons leaping
from all sides." He stared into the past, beholding glory. "City traffic is only a bit more difficult. ~ Raymond St. Elmo

Too much detail can bog down any story. Enough with the history of gunpowder, the geology of Hawaii, the processes of whaling, and cactus and tumbleweed. ~ Edward M. Lerner

Saxon and I had no business even attempting any type of relationship with each other. We were gunpowder and one hell of a spark, and I wasn't about to test our combustibility. ~ Liz Reinhardt

That's the moon, commissioner: hours of boredom followed by a few seconds of terror. ~ David Pedreira

There was a young man of Herne Bay
who was making some fireworks one day:
but he dropped his cigar
in the gunpowder jar.
There was a young man of Herne Bay. ~ Ogden Nash

Printer's ink has been running a race against gunpowder these many, many years. Ink is handicapped, in a way, because you can blow up a man with gunpowder in half a second, while it may take twenty years to blow him up with a book. But the gunpowder destroys itself along with its victim, while a book can keep on exploding for centuries. ~ Christopher Morley

You need to choose," he told me intently. "Adam or Samuel or neither. But you can't keep them dangling."
Adam was the Alpha of the local werewolf pack, my neighbor, and sometimes my date. Samuel was my first love, my first heartbreak, and currently my roommate. Just my roommate - though he'd like to be more.
I didn't trust either of them. Samuel's easygoing exterior masked a patient and ruthless predator. And Adam . . . well, Adam just flat scared me. And I was very much afraid that I loved them both.
"I know."
Warren dropped his eyes from mine, a sure sign he was uncomfortable. "I didn't brush my teeth with gunpowder this morning so I could go shooting my mouth off, Mercy, but this is serious. I know it's been difficult, but you can't have two dominant werewolves after the same woman without bloodshed. I don't know any other wolves who could have allowed you as much leeway as they have, but one of them is going to break soon. ~ Patricia Briggs

And I find chopsticks frankly distressing. Am I alone in thinking it odd that a people ingenious enough to invent paper, gunpowder, kites and any number of other useful objects, and who have a noble history extending back 3,000 years haven't yet worked out that a pair of knitting needles is no way to capture food? ~ Bill Bryson

Here in England there's a glass wall between you and the taste of reality. I don't want to see the last true passion tamed by railways, and men with Bibles telling everyone to cover their bodies." He spread his powerful, elegant hands. "Play your string quintets, by all means, Mr. Narraway, but don't silence the drums simply because you don't understand them. The men who play violins have steel and gunpowder, and the men who play drums don't. ~ Anne Perry

[Coleridge] selected an instance of what was called the sublime, in DARWIN, who imagined the creation of the universe to have taken place in a moment, by the explosion of a mass of matter in the womb, or centre of space. In one and the same instant of time, suns and planets shot into systems in every direction, and filled and spangled the illimitable void! He asserted this to be an intolerable degradation -referring, as it were, all the beauty and harmony of nature to something like the bursting of a barrel of gunpowder! that spit its combustible materials into a pock-freckled creation! ~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge

A whole bunch of big technological shocks occurred when Asian innovations - paper, gunpowder, the stirrup, the moldboard plow and so on - came to Europe via the Silk Road. ~ Charles C. Mann

I lost my hair mixing a substance called white gunpowder on the kitchen table. ~ Mark Oliphant

She handed Lord Payne a steaming cup, and he took an immediate, reckless draught. A devilish smile curved her way. "Gunpowder tea? Well done, Miss Finch. I do enjoy a lady with a sense of humor."
Now this one ... he was a rake. It was written all over him, in his fine dress and flirtatious manner. He might as well have had the word embroidered on his waistcoat, between the gold-thread flourishes. She knew all about men of his sort. Half the young ladies in Spindle Cove were either fleeing them or pining for them. ~ Tessa Dare

Guilt is to danger, what fire is to gunpowder; a man need not fear to walk among many barrels of powder, if he have no fire about him. ~ John Flavel

I miss it: the smell of sand, sweat, and gunpowder, rings of salt from dried sweat on my pants' legs, and around my waist just under where my armor sits. ~ Adam Fenner

The words were like gunpowder blasts, sparking me into thought and action. ~ Kailin Gow

Metaphor is no argument, though it be sometimes the gunpowder to drive one home, and imbed it in the memory. ~ James Russell Lowell

Jodiya's shoulders shook in a silent laugh. Slowly, she lowered her pistol.
And flung the grenade she held in her other hand.
The fuse kindled in midair, burning unnaturally fast. No chance to outrun the explosion.
Instead, Isyllt caught it. She hissed at the pain in her left hand, at the precious fraction of fuse being consumed. As soon as iron touched her skin, he magic began to work. Rust bloomed across damp metal, corroding at preternatural speed. Within heartbeats the iron shell crumbled in her hands, black powder hissing to the ground. She turned her head just in time as the fuse caught the last of the gunpowder and sprayed her with sparks.
Her hand twisted with the pain of it, but she bared her teeth at Jodiya. "Again?"
~ Amanda Downum

And remember, my son, that it is better for the soldier to smell of gunpowder than of civet, and that if old age should come upon you in this honourable calling, though you may be covered with wounds and crippled and lame, it will not come upon you without honour, and that such as poverty cannot lessen; especially now that provisions are being made for supporting and relieving old and disabled soldiers; for it is not right to deal with them after the fashion of those who set free and get rid of their black slaves when they are old and useless, and, turning them out of their houses under the pretence of making them free, make them slaves to hunger, from which they cannot expect to be released except by death. ~ Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra

We should note that almost every technological transformation of consequence has taken place under Western auspices - if not Western in the strict geographical sense, then Western in the notion of a cultural landscape shaped by free thought and the chance for profit. Even non-Western innovations, like stirrups and gunpowder, have been quickly modified and improved by Western militaries. Jet fighters, GPS-guided bombs, and laser-guided munitions are all products of Western expertise. Even the jihadists' most innovative and lethal weapons - improvised explosive devices and suicide belts - are cobbled together from Western-designed explosives and electronics. ~ Victor Davis Hanson

The smell of gunpowder is sweeter to me than all the perfumes of Arabia. ~ Pope Julius II

The invention of gunpowder and the constant improvement of firearms are enough in themselves to show that the advance of civilization has done nothing practical to alter or deflect the impulse to destroy the enemy, which is central to the very idea of war. ~ Carl Von Clausewitz

Lorraine insisted on cooking us something to eat, so while she got on with that we found an old cement bucket and made a big bowl of punch.
Blackbeard the pirate used to drink rum and gunpowder, as did most of his men, so we figured a little bit of cement in the punch wouldn't hurt us. Probably take some of the sweetness away. ~ Karl Wiggins

The monk that invented gunpowder did as much to stop war as did all the sermons of his brethren. ~ Austin O'Malley

The real use of gunpowder is to make all men tall. ~ Thomas Carlyle

We owe to the Middle Ages the two worst inventions of humanity
romantic love and gunpowder. ~ Andre Maurois

The confidence and security of a people can be measured by their attitude toward laxatives. At the high noon of the British sun, soldiers in far-flung outposts of the Empire doctored themselves with "a spoonful o' gunpowder in a cuppa 'ot tea." Purveyors and users of harsh laxatives were not afraid of being thought mean and unfriendly just because their laxatives were. But in America, the need to be nice is so consuming that nobody would dare take a laxative that makes you run up the stairs two at a time, pushing others aside and yelling, "Get out of the way! ~ Florence King

In our hurry of utilitarian progress, we have either forgotten the Indian altogether, or looked upon him only in a business point of view, as we do almost everything else; as a thriftless, treacherous, drunken fellow, who knows just enough to be troublesome, and who must be cajoled or forced into leaving his hunting-grounds for the occupation of very orderly and virtuous white people, who sell him gunpowder and whiskey, but send him now and then a missionary to teach him that it is wrong to get drunk and murder his neighbor. ~ Mary H. Eastman

How much can a man endure? How long could a man continue? These things I asked myself, for I am a questioning man, yet even as I asked the answers were there before me. If he be a man indeed, he must always go on, he must always endure. Death is an end to torture, to struggle, to suffering, but it is also an end to warmth, light, the beauty of a running horse, the smell of damp leaves, of gunpowder, the walk of a woman when she knows someone watches ... these things, too, are gone. ~ Louis L'Amour

Her voice left a flavor of honey and gunpowder on the air. ~ Peter S. Beagle

The devil hath his gunpowder plots, and mines, which may blow you up before you are aware. Not ~ Richard Baxter

Remember, as a responsible junior scientist, you must exercise caution before you ignite your gunpowder," the warning sternly cautioned.

Duly noted, sir. So let's get busy making explosives. ~ Rick Garvia

Histories of the world omitted China; if a Chinaman invented compass or movable type or gunpowder we promptly "forgot it" and named their European inventors. In short, we regarded China as a sort of different and quite inconsequential planet. ~ W.E.B. Du Bois

Most men don't seem to get that telling a pissed-off woman to calm down is like throwing gunpowder on a fire."

~ Liberty Jones ~ Lisa Kleypas

Hades cracked his knuckles on each hand, and the noise was like gunpowder caps exploding in the silence. "First dish duty," he mumbled to himself, "now possessed cowboys. This just isn't my night. ~ Josh Strnad

a gunpowder factory exploded at Delft in the 1600s, that the painter had been so haunted and obsessed by the destruction of his city that he painted it over and over. ~ Donna Tartt

What gunpowder did for war, the printing press has done for the mind. ~ Wendell Phillips

So she went into the garden to cut a cabbage-leaf, to make an apple-pie; and at the same time a great she-bear, coming up the street, pops its head into the shop. 'What! no soap?' So he died, and she very imprudently married the barber. ~ Samuel Foote

Our weaponry was not dropped onto our laps one morning. It is not manna from Sinai's skies. Since Agincourt, the White man has refined & evolved the gunpowder sciences until our modern armies may field muskets by the tens of thousands! Aha!' you will ask, yes, 'But why us Aryans? Why not the Unipeds of Ur or the Mandrakes of Mauritius?' Because, Preacher, of all the world's races, our love - or rather our rapacity - for treasure, gold, spices & dominion, oh, most of all, sweet dominion, is the keenest, the hungriest, the most unscrupulous! This rapacity yes, powers our Progress; for ends infernal or divine I know not. Nor do you know, sir. Nor do I overly care. I feel only gratitude that my Maker cast me on the winning side. ~ David Mitchell

What I'm really involved in when I'm writing is something that no one ever mentions when they see any play. Writing is like trying to make gunpowder out of chemicals. You have these words and sentences and the strange meanings and associations that are attached to the words and sentences, and you're somehow cooking these things all up so that they suddenly explode and have a powerful effect. That's what absorbs me from day to day in writing a play. ~ Wallace Shawn

In 1580, when William was sixteen, Campion passed through Warwickshire on his way to the more safely Catholic north. He stayed with a distant relative of Shakespeare's, Sir William Catesby, whose son Robert would later be a ringleader of the Gunpowder Plot. ~ Bill Bryson

Whatever you want, love, I'll give to you even if it means I'm made to crawl through foxholes and bodies and bullets to do it. You are the reason I fight this war. You are the victory that waits me on the other side of the gunpowder. ~ Eden Butler

The peoples of the old world have their cities built for times gone by, when railroads and gunpowder were unknown. We can have cities for the new age that has come, adopted to its better conditions of use and ornament. We want, therefore, a city planning profession ... ~ Horace Bushnell

They took everything and ground it down to dust as fine as gunpowder, they fired their guns into the air in victory and the strays flew out into the nothingness of histories written wrong and meant to be forgotten. Stray bullets and consequences are landing on our unsuspecting bodies even now. ~ Tommy Orange

That was the trouble with explaining with words. If you explained with gunpowder, people listened. ~ Dean F. Wilson

Latchkey! I mean ... I want to talk to you ... '
He fell silent, glancing behind him and shifting from foot to foot, his waterproof trousers rattling like the bulls' bladders that boys use to learn swimming. Sterlingov angrily spat out his cigarette.
'Well? What about?'
'A ... about a secret matter ,' Alyoshka whispered.
Dozens of ears floated around them in the dust waves; the whisper was heard, and it ran on like a spark along a gunpowder wick. Alyoshka's secret message, the mysterious special clothing, the deacon's catastrophe-all this was too much. The atmosphere was charged with thousands of volts, and something was needed to discharge the electricity, to clear the air. ("X") ~ Yevgeny Zamyatin

My nostrils dilate while savoring the acrid odor of gunpowder and blood ... Crazy with fury I will stain my rifle red while slaughtering any surrendered enemy that falls in my hands! With the deaths of my enemies I prepare my being for the sacred fight and join the triumphant proletariat with a bestial howl! ~ Che Guevara

The world has been printing books for 450 years, and yet gunpowder still has a wider circulation. Never mind! Printer's ink is the greater explosive: it will win. ~ Christopher Morley

The fuse is lit. You can run all you want to but you leave a trail of gunpowder in your wake. There's going to be a reckoning eventually. ~ Colleen Houck

If your mind and spirit are seduced by images of windswept ridge tops, flutters of aspen leaves caressed by a canyon breeze and the crimson tendrils of dying sun…if your fingers feel the silken pulse of a lover and your lips taste the deep kisses of building passion…if nostrils flare with the conjured scents of gunpowder and perfume, sage brush and pine, and your ears delight in the murmur of river current…if your heart pounds at the clash of good and evil and with each twist and turn of interwoven lives you feel a primal throb, then I have accomplished my mission. ~ Reid Lance Rosenthal

The Mania Speaks


You clumsy bootlegger. Little daffodil.
I watered you with an ocean and you plucked one little vein?
Downed a couple bottles of pills and got yourself carted off to the ER?
I gifted you the will of gunpowder, a matchstick tongue, and all you managed
was a shredded sweater and a police warning?
You should be legend by now.
Girl in an orange jumpsuit, a headline.
I built you from the purest napalm, fed you wine and bourbon.
Preened you in the dark, hammered lullabies into your thin skull.
I painted over the walls, wrote the poems. I shook your goddamn boots.
Now you want out? Think you'll wrestle me out of you with prescriptions?
A good man's good love and some breathing exercises?
You think I can't tame that? I always come home. Always.
Ravenous. Loaded. You know better than anybody:
I'm bigger than God. ~ Jeanann Verlee

He could fit what he knew about women in a bullet casing and still have room for the gunpowder. ~ Karen Witemeyer

Tatiana fretted over him before he left as if he were a five-year-old on his first day of school.
Shura, don't forget to wear your helmet wherever you go, even if it's just down the trail to the river.
Don't forget to bring extra magazines. Look at this combat vest. You can fit more than five hundred rounds. It's unbelievable. Load yourself up with ammo. Bring a few extra cartridges. You don't want to run out.
Don't forget to clean your M-16 every day. You don't want your rifle to jam."
Tatia, this is the third generation of the M-16. It doesn't jam anymore. The gunpowder doesn't burn as much. The rifle is self-cleaning."
When you attach the rocket bandolier, don't tighten it too close to your belt, the friction from bending will chafe you, and then irritation follows, and then infection...
...Bring at least two warning flares for the helicopters. Maybe a smoke bomb, too?"
Gee, I hadn't thought of that."
Bring your Colt - that's your lucky weapon - bring it, as well as the standard -issue Ruger. Oh, and I have personally organized your medical supplies: lots of bandages, four complete emergency kits, two QuickClots - no I decided three. They're light. I got Helena at PMH to write a prescription for morphine, for penicillin, for -"
Alexander put his hand over her mouth. "Tania," he said, "do you want to just go yourself?"
When he took the hand away, she said, "Yes."
He kissed her.
She said, "Spam. Three cans. And kee ~ Paullina Simons

Remember, remember the 5th of November. ~ Guy Fawkes

A culture, like an individual, is a more or less consistent pattern of thought and action. [...] Each people further and further consolidates its experience, and in proportion to the urgency of these drives the heterogenous items of behaviour take more and more congruous shape. [...]

Such patterning of culture cannot be ignored as if it were an unimportant detail. The whole, as modern science is insisting in many fields, is not merely the sum of all its parts, but the result of a unique arrangement and interrelation of the parts that has brought about a new entity. Gunpowder is not merely the sum of sulphur and charcoal and saltpeter, and no amount of knowledge even of all three of tis elements in all the forms they take in the natural world will demonstrate the nature of gunpowder. ~ Ruth Benedict

The three great elements of modern civilization, Gun powder, Printing, and the Protestant religion. ~ Thomas Carlyle

My house on wheels will have two feet once again and my dreams no frontiers, at least until the bullets have their say. I await you, sedentary gypsy, when the smell of gunpowder dissipates. ~ John Lee Anderson

We were gunpowder and one hell of a spark, and I wasn't about to test our combustibility. ~ Junk Miles ~ Liz Reinhardt

Oh, it doesn't work at all. That's the problem! It's an endless, halting parade of inspections, bribes, and nonsense - but if you're aboard a Texas vessel, you'll find less inconvenience along the way."
"It's because of their guns!" declared Mr. Henderson, once more escaping his reverie, bobbing out of it as if to gasp for air.
"Concise, my love." Mrs. Henderson gave him a smile. "And correct. Texans are heavily armed and often impatient. They don't need to be transporting arms and gunpowder to create a great nuisance for anyone who stops them, so they tend to be stopped ... less often. ~ Cherie Priest

All my time not devoted to my master's service was spent either in prayer, or in making experiments in casting different things in moulds made of earth, in attempting to make paper, gunpowder, and many other experiments, that, although I could not perfect, yet convinced me of its practicability if I had the means. ~ Nat Turner

(The Germans invented gunpowder - all credit to them! but they again made things square - they invented printing.) ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

The three inventions that made the Renaissance possible, the compass, gunpowder, and the printing press, came from China. The Babylonians scooped Pythagoras by fifteen hundred years. Long before anyone else, the Indians knew the world was round, and had calculated its age. And better than anyone else, the Mayans knew the stars, eyes of the night, and the mysteries of time.
Such details were not worthy of Europe's attention. ~ Eduardo Galeano

The humour of the Chinese people in inventing gunpowder and finding its best use in making firecrackers for their grandfathers' birthdays is merely symbolical of their inventiveness along merely pacific lines. ~ Lin Yutang

These sudden joys have sudden endings. They burn up in victory like fire and gunpowder. ~ William Shakespeare

All scientific effort must now be concentrated in the area of defence (sic). We have learned our lesson. We, the most civilized of people, have been misled by our own sages through the last four thousand years. We are now over-civilized in a world of barbaric peoples. WE were taught centuries ago that war is not the pastime of a civilized people. We stopped the development of explosive weapons a thousand years ago, on the ground that it was inhuman and monstrous to kill innocent people. Let warriors fight with broadswords and kill each other, we said, but others who are innocent must not die by accident. Therefore, though we understood the principles of rocketry, we did not allow it to be used. Even gunpowder was used only in fireworks. We felt secure in our place under heaven, the centre of a protective ring of subject peoples, beyond whose borders we did not penetrate. Who could have imagined that those outer barbarians would themselves develop atomic bombs and rocket weapons and all manner of deadly chemicals? ~ Pearl S. Buck

Every other man spoke a language entirely his own, which he had figured out by private thinking; he had his own ideas and peculiar ways. If you wanted to talk about a glass of water, you had to start back with God creating the heavens and earth; the apple; Abraham; Moses and Jesus; Rome; the Middle Ages; gunpowder; the Revolution; back to Newton; up to Einstein; then war and Lenin and Hitler. After reviewing this and getting it all straight again you could proceed to talk about a glass of water. "I'm fainting, please get me a little water." You were lucky even then to make yourself understood. And this happened over and over and over with everyone you met. You had to translate and translate, explain and explain, back and forth, and it was the punishment of hell itself not to understand or be understood. ~ Saul Bellow

THE GHOST OF THE AUTHOR'S MOTHER HAS A CONVERSATION WITH HIS FIANCÉE ABOUT HIGHWAYS

...and down south, honey. When the side of the road began to swell with dead and dying things, that's when us black children knew it was summer. Daddy didn't keep clocks in the house. Ain't no use when the sky round those parts always had some flames runnin' to horizon, lookin' like the sun was always out. back when I was a little girl, I swear, them white folk down south would do anything to stop another dark thing from touching the land, even the nighttime. We ain't have streetlights, or some grandmotherly voice riding through the fields on horseback tellin' us when to come inside. What we had was the stomach of a deer, split open on route 59. What we had was flies resting on the exposed insides of animals with their tongues touching the pavement. What we had was the smell of gunpowder and the promise of more to come, and, child, that'll get you home before the old folks would break out the moonshine and celebrate another day they didn't have to pull the body of someone they loved from the river. I say 'river' because I want you to always be able to look at the trees without crying. When we moved east, I learned how a night sky can cup a black girl in its hands and ask for forgiveness. My daddy sold the pistol he kept in the sock drawer and took me to the park. Those days, I used to ask him what he feared, and he always said "the bottom of a good glass." And then he stopped answer ~ Hanif Abdurraqib

I had concocted the gunpowder myself from niter, sulfur, charcoal, and a happy heart. When working with explosives, I've found that attitude is everything. ~ Alan Bradley

There is no glory in being a featherbed soldier, a man bedecked with gorgeous medals, but never beautified by a scar, or ennobled by a wound. All that you ever hear of such a soldier is that his spurs jingle on the pavement as he walks. There is no history for this carpet knight. He is just a dandy. He never smelled gunpowder in battle in his life. If he did, he fetched out his cologne to kill the offensive odor. Oh, if we could be wise enough to choose, even were as wise as the Lord Himself, we would choose the troubles which He has appointed to us, and we would not spare ourselves a single pang. ~ Charles Haddon Spurgeon