The other day my Twitter buddy @PlanMaestro tweeted this quote which intrigued me:

“If you make people think they’re thinking, they’ll love you; but if you really make them think, they’ll hate you.”

I asked him the source and he replied "Don Marquis," whom I'd never heard of, so I wikipedia'd him and learned that he was a turn of the century writer and contemporary of Mencken's. This led me to buy a book, The Annotated Archy and Mehitabel, a collection of columns mainly written by Marquis's muse "archy," a free-verse poet reincarnated into the body of a cockroach. One hundred years later archy's observations remain funny and revealing.

Here's archy's column from November 12, 1917:

boss my interest in science
is keen but my
sympathy with scientists is
declining very rapidly the
more i see of them the less i
want them to see
me i heard a couple of
entomologists talking the
other day you want to be sure
and get over to the brooklyn
museum on thursday evening he said
there is going to be a
lecture on a new
kind of killing bottle good
said the second one i will
surely be there if there is
anything that is needed for
the cause right now
it is a new killing bottle i
looked at him and he
seemed a kind hearted man too
just thoughtless likely
i thought what is sport to
you old fellow is
death to us insects morality
is all in the point
of view if the cockroaches
should start killing the
humans just to study them there
would a howl go up from
danville illinois to
beersheba palestine even germans
are not gassed for study but
only in the way of
business and battle many would
think twice about stepping
on a pacifist who would
send any number of potato bugs
to their funeral pyre without
remorse justice as maurice
maeterlinck points out is not
inherent in the universe and what
man has put there he
uses when he uses it at all
strictly for his own
purposes the world is so sad that
the only way to live
with it is to laugh at it