“No man can be a good husband, no man can be a good father, no man can be
a respectable citizen, no man can be a gentleman, and cuss. You can hang
out a sign of gentleman, but when you cuss you might as well take it in.
“There are three things which will ruin any town, open license saloons,
open stores on the Sabbath day and a dirty, cussing, swearing gang of
blacklegs on the streets. Let a town be known for these three things, and
these alone, and you could never start a boom half big enough to get one
man there.”
“You can’t go anywhere any more, in a car, a depot, a restaurant, but
what you find some fiend with his foul-mouthed oaths ready to spew them
out. What an awful place hell will be when it gets all of that bunch down
there.”
“Say, boys, if I was on a jury and you could prove to me that a father
had stolen a loaf of bread to keep his wife from starving, you could keep
me in the room until the ants took me out through the keyhole before I’d
stick him. That may not be law, I don’t know, but you’ll find there is a
big streak of humanity in Bill.”