We've got a rattlesnake by the tail, and the sooner we pound its damn head in the better.
Referring to the early U. S. action in the Korean war.
'Megaforce' is a privately financed army of freedom fighters financed and manned by all the free countries of the world. We don't say the force is American-based, but it's obvious because they are driving Fords, encountering rattlesnakes and they ride a Continental Airlines plane. Also the landscape looks like the American desert.
If I had my way we'd sleep every night all wrapped around each other like hibernating rattlesnakes.
The delicate sensitivity of a frightened rattlesnake.
You can't deal with rattlesnakes. You can't deal with communist governments.
The two things I feared as a boy most were rattlesnakes and white people.
RATTLESNAKE, n. Our prostrate brother, "Homo ventrambulans".
Other countries may boast of this and that, but nobody can touch the United States for poisonous snakes. We have about twenty species, most of them deadly, and Europe has only five or six, none of them much good. We have fifteen kinds of Rattlesnakes alone and nobody else has even one. [Footnote: There is a species in Central and South America, but it probably came from here.]
Rattlesnakes would be a lot more dangerous if they didn't have the rattle.
I loved her like a rabbit loves a rattlesnake
Rattlesnakes are only too plentiful everywhere; along the river bottoms, in the broken, hilly ground, and on the prairies and the great desert wastes alike...If it can it will get out of the way, and only coils up in its attitude of defence when it believes that it is actually menaced.
I learnt how to hunt rattlesnakes with an eagle for 'Serena.'
Going out and looking for managers is like going out and looking for rattlesnakes.
I wondered why it had to be so poisonous. Oleanders could live through anything, they could stand heat, drought, neglect, and put out thousands of waxy blooms. So what did they need poison for? Couldn't they just be bitter? They weren't like rattlesnakes, they didn't even eat what they killed. The way she boiled it down, distilled it, like her hatred. Maybe it was a poison in the soil, something about L.A., the hatred, the callousness, something we didn't want to think about, that the plant concentrated in its tissues. Maybe it wasn't a source of poison, but just another victim.