The Humbugs of the World quotes

Now it was a diplomatist—that is, a practical manager of one kind of government matters—who invented that wonderful phrase—a whole world full of humbug in half-a-dozen words—that “Language was given to us to conceal our thoughts.” It was another diplomatist, who said

“An ambassador is a gentleman sent to lie abroad for the good of his country.”

But need I explain to my own beloved countrymen that there is humbug in politics? Does anybody go into a political campaign without it? are no exaggerations of our candidate’s merits to be allowed? no depreciations of the other candidate?

But there is a more thorough humbug than any of these enterprises or systems.

The greatest humbug of all is the man who believes⁠—or pretends to believe⁠—that everything and everybody are humbugs.

We sometimes meet a person who professes that there is no virtue; that every man has his price, and every woman hers;

he exclaimed, “did I not tell you I had a new humbug that would double the sales of my pencils? I assure you my sales are more than quadrupled, and it is sometimes impossible to have them manufactured fast enough to supply the demand.

You Yankees are very clever, but by gar, none of you have discovered you should live all the better if you would die for six months.

It took Mangin to teach you that.”

It had nearly healed; but old Fremont opened it for me, for the third or fourth time, before I left California, and he did his business so thoroughly, I’m a used-up man. However, I reckon I may live six months or a year yet.”

This was spoken as coolly as if he had been talking about the life of a dog.

The immediate object of “Old Adams” in calling upon me was this.

“I hope you may, with all my heart, and a hundred years more if you desire it,” I replied.

“Call me a fool if I don’t earn the $500!” exclaimed Adams, with a triumphant laugh.

The “show” started off in a few days, and at the end of a fortnight I met it at Hartford, Connecticut.

The whale, the angel fish, and the golden pigeon.

If the fact could be definitely determined, I think it would be discovered that in this “wide awake” country there are more persons humbugged by believing too little than too much.

Many persons have such a horror of being taken in, or such an elevated opinion of their own acuteness, that they believe everything to be a sham, and in this way are continually humbugging themselves.

I knew them well; and in answer to their inquiry for the locality of the whale, I directed them to the basement. Half an hour afterward, they called at my office, and the acute mother, in a half-confidential, seriocomic whisper, said:

“Mr. B., it’s astonishing to what a number of purposes the ingenuity of us Yankees has applied India-rubber.”

I asked her meaning, and was soon informed that she was perfectly convinced that it was an India-rubber whale, worked by steam and machinery, by means of which he was made to rise to the surface at short intervals, and puff with the regularity of …

On another occasion, a lady equally shrewd, who lives neighbor to me in Connecticut, after regarding for a few minutes the “Golden Angel Fish” swimming in one of the Aquaria, abruptly addressed me with:

“You can’t humbug me, Mr. Barnum; that fish is painted!”

“Nonsense!” said I, with a laugh; “the thing is impossible!”

but, at the time Brandreth started, his was considered the most liberal newspaper-advertising of the day.

Advertising is to a genuine article what manure is to land⁠—it largely increases the product.

Thousands of persons may be reading your advertisement while you are eating, or sleeping, or attending to your business;

In Natchez, I made a similar purchase. In New Orleans, where I remained several months, I was a profitable customer, and had become thoroughly convinced that the only real “greenhorns” in the world were those who preferred meat or bread to Brandreth’s Pills.

I took them morning, noon, and night.

In fact, the advertisements announced that one could not take too many; for if one box was sufficient to purify the blood, eleven extra boxes would have no injurious effect.

those unanswered being too securely sealed for him to open without detection. To secure the services of the “Great Spirit-Postmaster,” a fee of five dollars must accompany your letter to the spirits; and the money is retained whether an answer is returned or not.

Rather high postage that!

Several years since, a gentleman living in Buffalo, N.Y., addressed some questions to one of his spirit-friends, and enclosed them, together with a single hair and a grain of sand, in an envelope, which he sealed so closely that no part of the contents could …

If the ballots are few in number, a blank is put with the pile, when the medium “palms” one, else the latter might be missed.

It seems the spirits can never give their names without being reminded of them by the investigator, and then they are so doubtful of their own identity that they have but little to say for themselves.

One medium to whom I have already alluded, after a sojourn of several years in California—whither he went from Boston, seeking whom he might humbug—has now returned to the East, and is operating in this city.

The Allen boy ought ever to hold him in grateful remembrance for coming to his rescue at such a critical period, when the spirits would not vouchsafe an explanation that would exculpate him from the grievous charge of imposture.

Mr. Hall deserves a leather medal now, and a soapstone monument when he is dead.

A person, whose initials are the same as the gentleman’s named above, once lived in Aroostook, Maine, and was in the habit of attending “spiritual circles,” in which he was sometimes influenced as a “personating medium,” and to represent the symptoms of the disease which …

Von Vleck, in that city, says:—“He (Dr. V. V.) performed the principal feats of the Allen boy, with his hands tied to the arm of the person with whom he was in communication.”

Horace Greeley says that if a man will be a consummate jackass and fool, he is not aware of anything in the Constitution to prevent it.

I believe Mr. Greeley is right; and I think no one can reasonably be expected to exercise common sense unless he is known to possess it. It is quite natural, therefore, that many of the spiritualists, lacking common sense, should pretend to have something better.

“John, have you watered the rum?” “Yes, Sir.” “And sanded the sugar?” “Yes, Sir.” “And dusted the pepper?” “Yes, Sir.” “And chicoried the coffee?” “Yes, Sir.”

“Then come up to prayers.” Let us hope that the grocers of the present day, while they adulterate less, do not pray less.

Between 1851 and 1854, Mr. Wakley of the London Lancet gave an awful roasting to the adulteration-interest in London. He employed an able analyzer, who began by going about without telling what he was at;

In good average milk, at sixty degrees of heat, the lactometer floats at twenty on its scale; and in poorer milk, at from that figure down. If it floats at fifteen, the milk is one-fourth water; if at ten, one half.

It would be a wonderful thing for mankind if some philosophic Yankee would contrive some kind of “ometer” that would measure the infusion of humbug in anything.

A “Humbugometer” he might call it. I would warrant him a good sale.

Importing don’t help you. Port is—or used to be, for very little is now made, comparatively—imitated in immense quantities at Oporto; and in the logwood trade, the European winemakers competed with the dyers.

It is a London proverb, that if you want genuine port-wine, you have got to go to Oporto and make your own wine, and then ride on the barrel all the way home.

It is perhaps possible to get pure wine in France by buying it at the vineyard; but if any dealer has had it, give up the idea!

The “glorious uncertainty” of drinking liquor under these circumstances is enough to make a man’s head swim without his getting drunk at all. There might, perhaps, be found a consolation like that of the Western traveller about the hash.

“When I travel in a canal-boat or steamboat,” quoth this brave and stout-stomached man, “I always eat the hash, because then I know what I’ve got!”

It was a good many years ago that the Parliament of England found it necessary to make a law to prevent sophisticating malt liquors. Here is the list of things they forbid to put into beer:

Sulphite of soda is now very commonly stirred into cider, to keep it from fermenting further. Sugar of lead is stirred into wines to make them clear, and to keep them sweet. And so on, through the whole long list.

It is a curious instance of people’s quiet acknowledgment of their own foolishness, that a popular form of the invitation to take a drink is, “Come and h’ist in some pizen!”

I know of no plan by which anybody can be sure of obtaining pure liquor of any description. Some persons always purchase their wines and liquors while they are under the customhouse lock and consequently before they have reached the hands of the importer.

… time a hundred gallon pipe of pure brandy reaches Wisconsin, at a cost of five or perhaps ten dollars per gallon, ninety-nine gallons and one pint of it is the identical whisky that was shipped from Wisconsin the same year at fifty cents per gallon.

Truly a homeoopathic dose of genuine brandy!

And even that whisky when it left Wisconsin was only half whisky;

You can begin with a dollar, he says; in two days make fifty dollars, and then sweep on in a grand career of affluence, making from $75 to $200 a day, “if you are industrious.” What is petroleum to this?

It is a mercy that we don’t all turn to and peddle to each other; we should all get too rich to speak!

The fellow, out of pure kindness and desire for your good, recommends you to buy all his recipes, as then you will be sure to sell something to everybody.

I do not imagine that there are many of these addlepates among my readers; but there is no harm in giving once more a very plain and easy direction which may possibly save somebody some money and some mortification.

Be content with what you can honestly earn. Know whom you deal with.

Do not try to get money without giving fair value for it. And pay out no money on strangers’ promises, whether by word of mouth, written letters, advertisements, or printed circulars.

“This man is worth so many millions, that man is such an influential editor. Could I have obtained such names if this were not a perfectly square thing?”

Ten thousand dollars will go some ways towards squaring almost anything, with many people, even if it is a mere matter of form; and so the old gentleman consented.

This fixed the whole official “slate.”

Last of all—land and money. Subscriptions to capital stock are to furnish money, money will buy land. And saying we’ve got land will procure subscriptions.

“It’s not much of a lie, after all,” said Rolleum, confidentially, to brother Digwell. “When we’ve said we’ve got it for awhile, we shall get it. It’s not a lie at all. It’s only discounting the truth at sixty days!”

So he and Digwell went to work and made a splendid prospectus and advertisement, the latter an abridged edition of the former.

Alboni, the singer, had an exquisitely sweet voice, but was a very big fat woman. Somebody accordingly remarked that she was an elephant that had swallowed a nightingale.

About as incongruous is the idea of a nation of damp, foggy, fat, full-figured, broad-sterned, gin-drinking, tobacco-smoking Dutchmen in Holland, going crazy over a flower. But they did so, for three or four years together.

They have not one single quality of the kind termed useful. They have nothing desirable except the beauty of a peculiarly short-lived blossom. You can do absolutely nothing with them except to look at them.

A speculation in them is exactly as reasonable as one in butterflies would be.

In the course of about one year, 1634–5, the tulip frenzy, after having increased for fifteen or twenty years with considerable speed, came to a climax, and poisoned the whole Dutch nation.

But the Dutch commander, on meeting him at the quarterdeck, and learning his errand, at once put all his kindly intentions completely one side, saying in imperfect English:

“It’sh no matter, it’sh no matter⁠—dere’s blaanty more Tutchmen in Holland!”

This success, which seems to have been an entirely sound and legitimate business success, made one sadly mistaken but very deep impression upon the ignorant and shallow mind of the Regent of France, which was the foundation of all the subsequent trouble.

The Regent became firmly convinced, that if a certain quantity of bank bills could do so much good, a hundred thousand times as many bills would surely do a hundred thousand times as much.

That is, he thought printing and issuing the bills was creating money. He paid no regard to the need of providing specie for them on demand, but thought he had an unlimited money factory in the city of Paris.

By such means coin gradually grew very scarce, and signs of a panic appeared.

The Regent tried to adjust matters by a decree that coin should be five percent less than paper; as much as to say, It is hereby enacted that there is a great deal more coin than there is!

This did not serve, and the Regent decreed again, that coin should be worth ten percent less than paper. Then he decreed that the bank must not pay more than $22 at once in specie;

such as that grave man of Scotland who was at last plainly told by a funny friend quite out of patience, “Why, you wouldn’t take a joke if it were fired at you out of a cannon!”

“Sir,” replied the Scot, with sound reasoning and grave thought, “Sir, you are absurd. You cannot fire a joke out of a cannon!”

But to return: It is certainly the case that frequently “the doctor” takes great care not to let the patient know what is the matter, and even not to let him know what he is swallowing.

A true physician, indeed, does not hasten to drug. The great French surgeon, Majendie, is even said to have commenced his official course of lectures on one occasion by coolly saying to his students:

“Gentlemen, the curing of disease is a subject that physicians know nothing about.”

This was doubtless an extreme way of putting the case. Yet it was in a certain sense exactly true.

In this country there are houses and places haunted by ghosts of Hessians, and Yankee ghosts, not to mention the headless Dutch phantom of Tarrytown, that turned out to be Brom Bones; but who ever heard of the ghost of an Indian?

And as for the ghost of a black man, evidently it would have to appear by daylight. You couldn’t see it in the dark!

I have no room to even enumerate the cases of haunted houses. One in Aix-la-Chapelle, a fine large house, stood empty five years on account of the knockings in it, until it was sold for almost nothing, and the new owner (lucky man!)

Mr. Wesley, the father of John Wesley, at Epworth, in England. This ghost was very troublesome, and utterly useless.

In fact, none of the ghosts that haunt houses are of the least possible use. They plague people, but do no good.

They act like the spirits of departed monkeys.

“Devour me?” quoth the great Frenchman—

“Hoofs, horns, graminivorous! You can’t do it⁠—clear out!”

And he did clear out.

“I am the devil!” was the reply.

“Well, you are a poor creature!” responded the antiquated virgin, as she stepped aside and passed by the strange animal

, probably not for a moment doubting it was his Satanic Majesty, but certainly not dreaming of being afraid of him.

The peddler rubbed his eyes, and seeing and smelling all these evidences of pandemonium, concluded he had died, and was now partaking of his final doom. But he took it very philosophically, for he complacently remarked to himself.

“In hell⁠—just as I expected!”

A story is told of a cool old sea captain, with a virago of a wife, who met one of these artificial devils in a lonely place. As the ghost obstructed his path, the old fellow remarked:

A story is told of a cool old sea captain, with a virago of a wife, who met one of these artificial devils in a lonely place. As the ghost obstructed his path, the old fellow remarked:

“If you are not the devil, get out! If you are, come along with me and get supper. I married your sister!”

The devil was always on hand at this time, and had the privilege of grabbing at the last man of the crowd. If he caught him, as he commonly did, the soul of the unhappy student became the property of his captor.

Hence arose the phrase “Devil take the hindmost.”

Sometime it happened that some very brisk fellow was left last by some accident. If he were brisk enough to dodge the devil’s grab, that personage only caught his shadow.

I think you will have the fair one. She favors the dark complexioned man, which means trouble. You face money, but you must earn it. There is a good deal, but you may not get much of it” etc., etc.

These words are exactly the sort of stuff that is sold by the witches of today.

But the greatest witch humbug of all the witchcraft of history, is that of Christendom for about three hundred years, beginning about the time of the discovery of America.

for in one and the same chapter he defies any opponents to disprove the existence of witchcraft, and then shows that a denial of witchcraft is the worst of all heresies, and must be punished with death.

Quite a number of excellent and sensible people were actually burnt on just this principle.

I do not undertake to give details of any witch trials; this sketch of the way in which they operated is all I can make room for, and sufficiently delineates this cruel and bloody humbug.

Among its inhabitants were merchants, reckoned remarkably shrewd, and many of them very wealthy; and quite a number of aristocratic families, who were looked up to with the abject toad-eating kind of civility that follows “the nobility.” On the whole,

Bristol was a very fashionable, rich, cultivated, and intelligent place⁠—considering.

One fine evening in the winter of 1812–13, the White Lion hotel, a leading inn at Bristol, was thrown into a wonderful flutter by the announcement that a very beautiful and fabulously wealthy lady, the Princess Cariboo, had just arrived by ship from an oriental …

… of Beauty,” that made old wrinkled faces look young, smooth, and blooming again, was the special merchandise of the Countess, and was, of course, in great request among the faded beaux and dowagers of the day, who were easily persuaded of their own restored loveliness.

The transmutation of baser metals into gold usually terminated in the transmigration of all the gold his victims had into the Count’s own purse.

In 1776, the Count and Countess came to London.

This sharp-witted female swindler now came in among the elements I have thus far been describing, to frame necklace, jeweller, cardinal, queen, and swindler, all together into her plot, just as the keystone drops into an arch and locks it up tight.

No mortal knows where ideas come from.

Suddenly a conception is in the mind, whence, or how, we do not know, any more than we know Life. The devil himself might have furnished that which now popped into the cunning, wicked mind of this adventuress.

The king was enchanted; for these mere specimens, as they were deemed, must, if genuine, be worth in themselves a mint of money; and a province full of such—why, the thought was charming!

Thus the great Kingfish was fairly hooked, and Riza Bey could take his time.

The golden tide that flowed in to him did not slacken, and his own expenses were all provided for at the Tuileries. The only thing remaining to be done was a grand foray on the tradesmen of Paris, and this was splendidly executed.

Of course, a hue and cry was raised in all directions, but totally in vain. Riza Bey, the Persian Shah, and the gentlemen in flowerpots, had “gone glimmering through the dream of things that were.”

L’etat c’est moi had been sold for thirty cents!

It was afterward believed that a noted barber and suspected bandit at Leghorn, who had once really traveled in Persia, and there picked up the knowledge and the ready money that served his turn, was the perpetrator of this pretty joke and speculation, as he …

“I do,” said the prophet.

“Then,” rejoined the other, “all I have to say is, you are a remarkably good-looking fellow for one of your age.”

The confounded prophet grinned, scowled, and exclaimed indignantly:

The most prominent of the heathen humbugs were the mysteries, the oracles, the sibyls (N.B., the word is often misspelled sybils,) and augury.

Every respectable Pagan religion had some mysteries, just as every respectable Christian family has a bible⁠—and, as an ill-natured proverb has it, a skeleton.

It was considered a poor religion—a one horse religion, so to speak—that had no mysteries.

They found the god to be done up in a very large and suspicious looking bundle. Having sacrilegiously cut the string, they unrolled one envelop of mats and cloths after another, until they had taken off more than a hundred wrappers.

The god grew smaller, and smaller, and smaller; and the wonder of the travelers what he could be, larger and larger.

At last, the very innermost of all the coverings fell off, and the great heathen god was revealed in all his native majesty. It was a cracked soda-water bottle! This indicates—what is beyond all question the fact—that the heathen mysteries had their foundation in gas.

and the wonder of the travelers what he could be, larger and larger. At last, the very innermost of all the coverings fell off, and the great heathen god was revealed in all his native majesty. It was a cracked soda-water bottle!

This indicates⁠—what is beyond all question the fact⁠—that the heathen mysteries had their foundation in gas.

Indeed, the whole composition of these impositions was, gammon, deception, hypocrisy—Humbug! Truly, the science of Humbug is entitled to some consideration, simply for its antiquity, if for nothing else.

Whether you got your reply in words spoken by the rattling of an old pot, by observing an ox’s appetite, throwing dice, or sleeping for a dream, your own proceedings were essentially the same.

“Terms invariably net cash in advance or its equivalent.”

A fine ox or sheep sacrificed was cash;

the appearance of the entrails of beasts sacrificed, etc., etc. These augurs were, for a long time, much respected in Rome, but, at last, the more thoughtful people lost their belief in them, and they became so ridiculous that

Cicero, who was himself one of them, said he could not see how one augur could look another in the face without laughing.

It is humiliating to reflect how long and how extensively such barefaced and monstrous humbugs as these have maintained unquestioned authority over almost the whole race of man. Nor has humanity, by any means, escaped from such debasing slavery now;