Mark Twain (1835-1910)

Quotes

• Whenever the literary German dives into a sentence, that is the last you are going to see of him until he emerges on the other side of his atlantic with his verb in his mouth.

• Soap and education are not as sudden as a massacre but they are more deadly in the long run.

• If the desire to kill and the opportunity to kill always came together, who would escape hanging?

• This is the day upon which we are reminded of what we are on the other three hundred and sixty-four.

• In our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either.

• Carlyle said, "A lie cannot live"; it shows he did not know how to tell them.

• It's a good idea to obey all the rules when you're young just so you'll have the strength to break them when you're old.

• In certain trying circumstances, urgent circumstances, desperate circumstances, profanity furnishes a relief denied even to prayer.

• There is no sadder sight than a young pessimist, except an old optimist.

• Statistics show that we lose more fools on this day than on all other days of the year put together. This proves, by the numbers left in stock, that one Fourth of July per year is now inadequate, the country has grown so.

• There ought to be a room in every house to swear in.

• Good breeding consists in concealing how much we think of ourselves and how little we think of the other person.

• We all live in the protection of certain cowardices which we call our principles.

• Barring that natural expression of villainy which we all have, the man looked honest enough.

• I have done some indiscreet things in my day, but this thing of playing myself for a prophet was the worst. Still, it had its ameliorations. A prophet doesn't have to have any brains. They are good to have, of course, for the ordinary exigencies of life, but they are no use in professional work. It is the restfulest vocation there is. When the spirit of prophecy comes upon you, you merely take your intellect and lay it off somewhere in a cool place for a rest, and unship your jaw and leave it alone; it will work itself. The result is prophecy.

• One of the most striking differences between a cat and a lie is that the cat has only nine lives.

• Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please. (Facts are stubborn, but statistics are more pliable.)

• I never could tell a lie that anybody would doubt, nor a truth that anybody would believe.

• A lie can travel halfway round the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.

• Why shouldn't truth be stranger than fiction? Fiction, after all, has to make sense.