History jokes, famous anecdotes and short funny stories. Famous funny quotes and sayings

You ought to possess your whole body as a poor mule loaded, as long as it is possible, as long as you are allowed. But if there be a press, and a soldier should lay hold of it, let it go, do not resist, nor murmur; if you do, you will receive blows, and nevertheless you will also lose the mule.

Epictetus, Discourses. Book IV

Interestingly, the second part of this quote is a lot more practical, when not fraught with the burden of a philosophical analogy.

The empress Elizabeth of Russia during the war with Sweden commanded the old hetman of the Cossacks to come to court on his way to Finland. " If the emperor, your father," said the hetman, "had taken my advice, your majesty would not now have been annoyed by the Swedes." "What was your advice ?" asked the empress. "To put all the nobility to death, and transplant the people into Russia." "But that," said the empress, "would have been cruel." "I do not see that," he replied quietly; "they are all dead now, and they would only have been dead if my advice had been taken."

Nell Gwynn, a new mistress of King Charles II, was presented with a coach which apparently used to belong to someone else. When Nelly was insulted in her coach at Oxford by the mob calling her "a Catholic whore", after mistaking her for the Duchess of Portsmouth, she looked out of the window and said, with her usual good humor, 'Pray, good people, be civil; I am the Protestant whore.' This laconic speech drew upon her the favor of the populace, and Nell was suffered to proceed without further molestation.

"The British empire, sir," exclaimed an orator, "is one on which the sun never sets."— "And one," replied an auditor, " in which the tax-collector never goes to bed."

From "The Jest Book"

Once a notoriously tough businessman told Mark Twain, "Before I die I mean to make a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. I will climb Mount Sinai and read the Ten Commandments aloud at the top." Disgusted, Twain replied, "I have a better idea. You could stay at home in Boston and keep them."