Mark Twain (1835 – 1910)
Better known by his pen name Mark Twain, was an American humorist, novelist, writer, and lecturer.
Few sinners are saved after the first twenty minutes of a sermon.
The people of those foreign countries are very, very ignorant. They looked curiously at the costumes we had brought from the wilds of America. They observed that we talked loudly at table sometimes. They noticed that we looked out for expenses and got what we conveniently could out of a franc, and wondered where in the mischief we came from. In Paris they just simply opened their eyes and stared when we spoke to them in French! We never did succeed in making those idiots understand their own language.
Nature knows no indecencies; man invents them.
There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.
We have not the reverent feeling for the rainbow that the savage has, because we know how it is made. We have lost as much as we gained by prying into that matter.
I am opposed to millionaires, but it would be dangerous to offer me the position.
A God who could make good children as easily as bad, yet preferred to make bad ones; who could have made every one of them happy, yet never made a single happy one; who made them prize their bitter life, yet stingily cut it short; who gave his angels eternal happiness unearned, yet required his other children to earn it; who gave his angels painless lives, yet cursed his other children with biting miseries and maladies of mind and body; who mouths justice, and invented hell — mouths mercy, and invented hell — mouths Golden Rules and forgiveness multiplied by seventy times seven, and invented hell; who mouths morals to other people, and has none himself; who frowns upon crimes, yet commits them all; who created man without invitation, then tries to shuffle the responsibility for man's acts upon man, instead of honorably placing it where it belongs, upon himself; and finally, with altogether divine obtuseness, invites his poor abused slave to worship him!
He was ignorant of the commonest accomplishments of youth. He could not even lie.
Laws are sand, customs are rock. Laws can be evaded and punishment escaped, but an openly transgressed custom brings sure punishment.
Thunder is good, thunder is impressive; but it is lightning that does the work.
You can't depend on your judgment when your imagination is out of focus.
All creatures kill—there seems to be no exception; but of the whole list, man is the only one that kills for fun; he is the only one that kills in malice, the only one that kills for revenge.
To put it in rude, plain, unpalatable words — true patriotism, real patriotism: loyalty not to a Family and a Fiction, but a loyalty to the Nation itself!
..."Remember this, take this to heart, live by it, die for it if necessary: that our patriotism is medieval, outworn, obsolete; that the modern patriotism, the true patriotism, the only rational patriotism, is loyalty to the Nation ALL the time, loyalty to the Government when it deserves it." [Czar Nicholas II]
Geological time is not money. A pity too; for it would have abolished poverty from the earth. Let us adopt geological time, then time being money, — there will be no more poverty. We are all missionaries (propagandists of our views). Each of us disapproves of the other missionaries; in fact detests them, as a rule. I am one of the herd myself. It is noticeable that the professional always uses the one license: "Go ye into all the world," and ignores the Golden Rule which would restrain him from entering China and one or two other countries where he is not wanted and is not welcome.
In estimating worldly values the Jew is not shallow, but deep. With precocious wisdom he found out in the morning of time that some men worship rank, some worship heroes, some worship power, some worship God, and that over these ideals they dispute and cannot unite--but that they all worship money; so he made it the end and aim of his life to get it. The cost to him has been heavy; his success has made the whole human race his enemy...
My kind of loyalty was loyalty to one's country, not to its institutions or its officeholders. The country is the real thing, the substantial thing, the eternal thing; it is the thing to watch over, and care for, and be loyal to; institutions are extraneous, they are its mere clothing, and clothing can wear out, become ragged, cease to be comfortable, cease to protect the body from winter, disease, and death.
A powerful agent is the right word. Whenever we come upon one of those intensely right words in a book or a newspaper the resulting effect is physical as well as spiritual, and electrically prompt.
Definition of a classic — something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.
All you have to fear is your mother's cooking.
Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on, or by imbeciles who really mean it.