There are basically two types of people. People who accomplish things, and people who claim to have accomplished things. The first group is less crowded.

When you want genuine music -- music that will come right home to you like a bad quarter, suffuse your system like strychnine whisky, go right through you like Brandreth's pills, ramify your whole constitution like the measles, and break out on your hide like the pin-feather pimples on a picked goose, -- when you want all this, just smash your piano, and invoke the glory-beaming banjo!

It is hard enough luck being a monarch, without being a target also.

We need not worry so much about what man descends from; it's what he descends to that shames the human race.

Tis Better to Sit there and LOOK the fool, than to open your mouth and prove it.

An average English word is four letters and a half. By hard, honest labor I've dug all the large words out of my vocabulary and shaved it down till the average is three and a half... I never write metropolis for seven cents, because I can get the same money for city. I never write policeman, because I can get the same price for cop.... I never write valetudinarian at all, for not even hunger and wretchedness can humble me to the point where I will do a word like that for seven cents; I wouldn't do it for fifteen.

It is best to read the weather forecast before praying for rain.