Loyalty to petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul.

It's easy to make friends, but hard to get rid of them.

The New York papers have long known that no large question is ever really settled until I have been consulted.

[N]o country can be well governed unless its citizens as a body keep religiously before their minds that they are the guardians of the law and that the law officers are only the machinery for its execution, nothing more.

I have carried a revolver; lots of us do, but they are the most innocent things in the world.

You don't know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain't no matter. That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly. There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth. That is nothing. I never seen anybody but lied one time or another, without it was Aunt Polly, or the widow, or maybe Mary. Aunt Polly—Tom's Aunt Polly, she is—and Mary, and the Widow Douglas is all told about in that book, which is mostly a true book, with some stretchers, as I said before.

By his father he is English, by his mother he is Americanto my mind the blend which makes the perfect man.