Printer's Ink

Printer's ink has been running a race against gunpowder these many, many years.  Ink is handicapped, in a way, because you can blow up a man with gunpowder in half a second, while it may take twenty years to blow him up with a book.  But the gunpowder destroys itself along with its victim, while a book can keep on exploding for centuries.

-- Christopher Morley (1890-1957), American journalist, novelist, poet, and playwright, The Haunted Bookshop (1919)