The quiet American

Calvin Coolidge, President of the United States, from 1923 to 1929, was remarkably uncommunicative. One story told about him has it that a friend missed a sermon on sin that Coolidge sat through. The friend asked Coolidge what the preacher had said about sin and Coolidge replied: 'He said he was against it.' Perhaps in church he had merely been bored, but he appeared to be wittier when, at a public dinner, a woman told him that she had bet some friends that she could make him speak at least three words to her in the course of the evening. All he said to her was: 'You lose.'