“Printer's ink has been running a race against gunpowder these many, many years.”

The Haunted Bookshop (1919)
Context: 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.

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update Sept. 27, 2023. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Printer's ink has been running a race against gunpowder these many, many years." by Christopher Morley?
Christopher Morley photo
Christopher Morley 30
American journalist, novelist, essayist and poet 1890–1957

Related quotes

Cornelia Funke photo

“Dear ruins! Many a year has been closed, many a month, holy and unhallowed, has elapsed, since I exchanged tender vows with their fair inhabitants!”

Labīd (560–661) Sahabah and poet

Translated by C. J. Lyall, quoted in Arabian Poetry, p. 41 https://archive.org/details/arabianpoetryfo00clougoog/page/n127/mode/2up
Couplets

Todd Akin photo

“Now, Social Security through the years, for many many people, has been a terrible investment. It's really a tax, that's all it is. Social Security is a tax.”

Todd Akin (1947) American politician

Washington Minute, CSPAN, , quoted in * 2011-03-19
GOP Rep. Todd Akin On Social Security: ‘I Don’t Like It’
Alex
Seitz-Wald
Think Progress
http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2011/03/19/151641/todd-akin-i-dont-like-social-security/

Calvin Coolidge photo

“America is a large country. It is a tolerant country. It has room within its borders for many races and many creeds.”

Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933) American politician, 30th president of the United States (in office from 1923 to 1929)

1920s, Ordered Liberty and World Peace (1924)
Context: To continue to be independent we must continue to be whole-hearted American. We must direct our policies and lay our course with the sole consideration of serving our own people. We cannot become the partisans of one nation, or the opponents of another. Our domestic affairs should be entirely free from foreign interference, whether such attempt be made by those who are without or within our own territory. America is a large country. It is a tolerant country. It has room within its borders for many races and many creeds. But it has no room for those who would place the interests of some other nation above the interests of our own nation.

Camille Paglia photo

“The born-yesterday French-besotted faddists, addicted sniffers of wet printer’s ink, think they’re starting on the ground floor; so they’re condemned to another hundred years of trial and error. The rest of us can safely ignore them.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Sex, Art and American Culture : New Essays (1992), Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders : Academe in the Hour of the Wolf, p. 202

Elizabeth Gilbert photo
Novalis photo

“Many counterrevolutionary books have been written in favor of the Revolution. But Burke has written a revolutionary book against the Revolution.”

Fragment No. 104; on Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790).
Blüthenstaub (1798)

Mark Strand photo

“Ink runs from the corners of my mouth.
There is no happiness like mine.
I have been eating poetry.”

Mark Strand (1934–2014) Canadian-American poet, essayist, translator

Source: Selected Poems

Related topics