Mark Twain Quotes

Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.

For all the talk you hear about knowledge being such a wonderful thing, instinct is worth forty of it for real unerringness.

When in doubt tell the truth.

Monarchies, aristocracies, and religions are all based upon that large defect in your race - the individual's distrust of his neighbor, and his desire, for safety's or comfort's sake, to stand well in his neighbor's eye. These institutions will always remain, and always flourish, and always oppress you, affront you, and degrade you, because you will always be and remain slaves of minorities. There was never a country where the majority of the people were in their secret hearts loyal to any of these institutions.

In the first place, God made idiots. That was for practice. Then he made school boards.

A Patriot is someone who stands for his country always, and for his government when it is deserved.

Annihilation has no terrors for me, because I have already tried it before I was born -a hundred million years -and I have suffered more in an hour, in this life, than I remember to have suffered in the whole hundred million years put together. There was a peace, a serenity, an absence of all sense of responsibility, an absence of worry, an absence of care, grief, perplexity; and the presence of a deep content and unbroken satisfaction in that hundred million years of holiday which I look back upon with a tender longing and with a grateful desire to resume, when the opportunity comes.

There are two things nobody should ever have to watch being made, sausage and laws.

There are people who can do all fine and heroic things but one - keep from telling their happiness to the unhappy.

All my life I have been honest-comparatively honest. I could never use money I had not made honestly-I could only lend it.

Let us live so that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry.

There is nothing in the world like persuasive speech to fuddle the mental apparatus.

That is their way, those plagues, those scientists - peg, peg, peg - dig, dig, dig - plod, plod, plod. I wish I could catch a cargo of them for my place; it would be an economy. Yes, for years, you see. They never give up. Patience, hope, faith, perseverance; it is the way of all the breed.

You ought never to sass old people- unless they sass you first.

When the world is made to be idiot-proof, the world will become overpopulated with idiots.

All men are ignorant, just on different subjects.

Such is luck! And such the treatment which honest, good perservance gets so often at the hands of unfair and malicious Nature!

Hero: Person in a book who does things which he can't and girl marries him for it.

I said nothing of the sort.

When there was room on the ledge outside of the pots and boxes for a cat, the cat was there- in sunny weather- stretched at full length, asleep and blissful, with her furry belly to the sun and a paw curved over her nose.

Congress: America's only true criminal class.

I wonder if God created man because He was disappointed with the monkey.

He wa'n't no common dog, he wa'n't no mongrel; he was a composite. A composite dog is a dog that is made up of all the valuable qualities that's in the dog breed-kind of a syndicate; and a mongrel is made up of all riffraff that's left over.

What's the use you learning to do right , when it's troublesome to do right and it ain't no trouble to do wrong, and the wages is just the same?

Eating and sleeping are the only activities that should be allowed to interrupt a man's enjoyment of his cigar.

Names are not always what they seem. The common Welsh name Bzjxxllwcp is pronounced Jackson.

If work were so pleasant, the rich would keep it for themselves.

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!

If you want me to give you a two-hour presentation, I am ready today. If you want only a five-minute speech, it will take me two weeks to prepare.

When a man arrives at great prosperity God did it: when he falls into disaster he did it himself.

Would it not be prudent to get our civilization tools together, and see how much stock is left on hand in the way of Glass Beads and Theology, and Maxim Guns and Hymn Books, and Trade Gin and Torches of Progress and Enlightenment (patent adjustable ones, good to fire villages with, upon occasion), and balance the books, and arrive at the profit and loss, so that we may intelligently decide whether to continue the business or sellout the property and start a new Civilization Scheme on the proceeds.

The rule is perfect: in all matters of opinion our adversaries are insane.

There is no other life; life itself is only a vision and a dream for nothing exists but space and you. If there was an all-powerful God, he would have made all good, and no bad.

The partitions of the houses were so thin we could hear the women occupants of adjoining rooms changing their minds.

It is yet another Civilized Power, with its banner of the Prince of Peace in one hand and its loot-basket and its butcher-knife in the other. Is there no salvation for us but to adopt Civilization and lift ourselves down to its level?.

Our lives, our liberty, and our property are never in greater danger than when Congress is in session.

There is no character, howsoever good and fine, but it can be destroyed by ridicule, howsoever poor and witless.

He is now rising from affluence to poverty.

...heaven for climate, and hell for society.

When majority is insane, sane must go to asylum.

Don't just sit there and worry. Be proactive. Do something - anything - about what's worrying you so you can gain information, focus and control over the situation. I've suffered a great many catastrophes in my life. Most of them never happened.

A friend is someone who stays in when the rest of the world has gone out.

Principles have no real force except when one is well-fed.

Many people have the reasoning facility, but no one uses it in religious matters.

Herschel removed the speckled tent-roof from the world and exposed the immeasurable deeps of space, dim-flecked with fleets of colossal suns sailing their billion-leagued remoteness.

When angry, count to a hundred.

For England must not fall: it would mean an inundation of Russian & German political degradations which would envelop the globe & steep it in a sort of Middle-Age night & slaverly which would last till Christ comes again - which I hope he will not do; he made trouble enough before.

Repartee is something we think of twenty-four hours too late.