Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambition.

A person with a new idea is a crank until the idea succeeds.

It has always been a peculiarity of the human race that it keeps two sets of morals in stock-the private and the real, and the public and the artificial.

Conformity—the natural instinct to passively yield to that vague something recognized as authority.

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.

I would much prefer to suffer from the clean incision of an honest lancet than from a sweetened poison.

A monarch, when good, is entitled to the consideration which we accord to a pirate who keeps Sunday School between crimes; when bad, he is entitled to none at all.