Metaphor is no argument, though it be sometimes the gunpowder to drive one home, and imbed it in the memory.
Remember, remember the 5th of November.
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.
The smell of gunpowder is sweeter to me than all the perfumes of Arabia.
Genius, as an explosive power, beats gunpowder hollow.
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.
Her voice left a flavor of honey and gunpowder on the air.
GUNPOWDER, n. An agency employed by civilized nations for the settlement of disputes which might become troublesome if left unadjusted.
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
The proverb answers where the sermon fails.
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?
You can't stop things like Bitcoin. [. . . ]. It's like trying to stop gunpowder.
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.
The monk that invented gunpowder did as much to stop war as did all the sermons of his brethren.
And if the problem [with contraception] is promiscuity, then why does the immense popularity of Viagra go unchecked? Doesn't it make more sense to leave the bullets out of the gun than to try to avoid being shot? Especially when the gun is an old musket, and you have to clean it out and tamp down gunpowder, melt down scraps of lead and pour it into a mold, wait for it to cool - only to have it take forever to finally go off?
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.
What gunpowder did for war the printing press has done for the mind.
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.
The real use of gunpowder is to make all men tall.
Exercise is the worst thing in the world and as bad an invention as gunpowder.
