Everyone loves a rascal. Society may frown and shake its collective head, but most of us aren’t above a private chuckle at the irreverent words of our more scandalous celebrities.

Mark Twain, seeing various denominations consign each other to hell for adhering to the “wrong” doctrines, remarked, “What a hell of a heaven it will be, when they get all these hypocrites assembled there!”

In 47 BC, Pharnaces II gambled that Rome was too weak from its recent civil war to stop him from helping himself to Roman territory. Gaius Julius Caesar, still on shaky ground with the Senate, roundly defeated him and sent a pointed message back to Rome: “Veni. Vidi. Vici.” I came. I saw. I conquered.

Alexander of Macedon, called Alexander the Great, upon reading the latest in a long line of demanding letters from his infamously demanding mother, is rumored to have said, “It’s a high rent she demands for nine months in the womb.”

A couple of millennia later, W.C. Fields, who made a career out of being a rascal, became infamous for his hatred of the city of Philadelphia. His tombstone is inscribed with the words, “All things considered, I’d rather be in Philadelphia.”

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