Not at all, my ardent and inquiring friends, there is a scientific humbug just as large as any other. We have all heard of the Moon Hoax. Do none of you remember the Hydrarchos Sillimannii, that awful Alabama snake?
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"I am by nature a 'speculator.' I love to speculate."
"The American people like to be humbugged."
"The public loves a good fraud, if it's a good fraud."
"The road to success is always under construction."
"I was born a showman, and I shall die a showman."
American showman and Barnum & Bailey Circus co-founder, whose autobiography popularized Gilded Age commercial spectacle. Closely associated with James Anthony Bailey (his circus business partner). For an intellectual contrast, see Mark Twain, American author and Gilded Age satirist — Twain's The Gilded Age (1873, with Charles Dudley Warner) named the entire era of corrupt commercial spectacle Barnum embodied — Twain's later writing repeatedly attacked Barnum-style hucksterism as the era's moral disease.
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