"It is a damn poor mind indeed which can't think of at least two ways to spell any word."
- President Andrew Jackson
"I don't give a damn for a man that can only spell a word one way."
- Mark Twain
"...ours is a mongrel language which started with a child's vocabulary of three hundred words, and now consists of two hundred and twenty-five thousand; the whole lot, with the exception of the original and legitimate three hundred, borrowed, stolen, smouched from every unwatched language under the sun, the spelling of each individual word of the lot locating the sourceof the theft and preserving the memory of the revered crime."
- Mark Twain
"... the English alphabet is pure insanity...", "It can hardly spell any word in the language with any degree of certainty."
- Mark Twain
"But I appeal to you in behalf of the generations which are to follow you, ... age after age, cycle after cycle. I pray you, consider them and be generous. Lift this heavy burden (traditional spelling) from their backs. Do not send them toiling and moiling down the 20th century still bearing it, still oppressed by it ... I pray you, let the hieroglyphics (old spelling) go, and thus save millions of years of useless time and labor to fifty generations of posterity that are to follow you... This cost of time is much too expensive. It could be employed more usefully in other industries, and with better results."
- Mark Twain
"The English have no respect for their language, and will not teach their children to speak it. They spell it so abominably that no man can teach himself what it sounds like. It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman hate or despise him. German and Spanish are accessible to foreigners: English is not accessible even to Englishmen."
- G.B. Shaw, Pygmalion, Preface
"Correct spelling, indeed, is one of the arts that are far more esteemed by school ma'ams than by practical men, neck-deep in the heat and agony of the world."
- Henry Louis Mencken
"A man occupied with public or other important business cannot, and need not, attend to spelling."
- Napoleon Buonaparte
"My spelling is Wobbly. It's good spelling but it Wobbles, and the letters get in the wrong places."
- A. A. Milne
"If the professors of English will complain to me that the students who come to the universities, after all those years of study, still cannot spell 'friend', I say to them that something's the matter with the way you spell 'friend'."
