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'''[[w:Mark Twain|Samuel Langhorne Clemens]]''' ([[November 30]], [[1835]] – [[April 21]], [[1910]]), known as '''Mark Twain''', was an American humorist, novelist, writer, and lecturer.
 
:'''''See also:'''''
::'''''[[Life on the Mississippi]]'''''
::'''''[[Pudd'nhead Wilson]]'''''
::'''''[[The Prince and the Pauper]]'''''
::'''''[[A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court]]'''''
::'''''[[The Adventures of Tom Sawyer]]'''''
::'''''[[Adventures of Huckleberry Finn]]'''''
::'''''[[Following the Equator]]'''''
 
== Quotes ==
[[File:Darkness Over Eden 2709.jpg |thumb|right|Truth is the most valuable thing we have. Let us economize it.]]
 
* I haven't a particle of confidence in a man who has no redeeming petty vices whatsoever.
*
** "Answers to Correspondents", ''[[w:The Californian (1860s newspaper)|The Californian]]'', 17 June 1865.<!--ref ''Early Tales & Sketches, v.2, 1864-1865'', Branch and Hirst, ed. (1981) http://books.google.com/books?id=oK3HrsDGYmUC&pg=PA187 --> Anthologized in ''[http://books.google.com/books?id=kqMDAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA35 The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, and Other Sketches]'' (1867)
 
* I'll risk forty dollars that he can outjump any frog in Calaveras county.
 
** "[[w:The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County|The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County]]"; first published as "Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog" in the ''[[w:New York Saturday Press|New York Saturday Press]]'', 18 November 1865; revised by the author and reprinted the following month in ''[[w:The Californian (1860s newspaper)|The Californian]]''; first anthologized in ''[http://books.google.com/books?id=kqMDAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA17 The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, and Other Sketches]'' (1867), ed. John Paul
 
* I don't see no p'ints about that frog that's any better'n any other frog.
Line 51 ⟶ 55:
** "The Undertaker's Chat", first published as "A Reminiscence of the Back Settlements" in ''[[w:Galaxy Magazine (1866)|The Galaxy]]'', Vol. 10, No. 5, November 1870[http://books.google.com/books?id=2TIZAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA731]. Anthologized in ''[http://books.google.com/books?id=5LcIAAAAQAAJ Mark Twain's Sketches, New and Old‎]'' (1875)
 
*"It has become a sarcastic proverb that a thing must be true if you saw it in a newspaper. That is the opinion intelligent people have of that lying vehicle in a nutshell. But the trouble is that the stupid people–who constitute the grand overwhelming majority of this and all other nations–do believe and are moulded and convinced by what they get out of a newspaper, and there is where the harm lies."... "That awful power, the public opinion of a nation, is created in America by a horde of ignorant, self-complacent simpletons who failed at ditching and shoemaking and fetched up in journalism on their way to the poorhouse."
** – Mark Twain "License of the Press" speech, 1873
 
* A baby is an inestimable blessing and bother.
Line 83 ⟶ 87:
** Letter to William Dean Howells, 27 February 1885, in Albert Bigelow Paine, ''Mark Twain's letters: Arranged with Comment'' (1917), Vol. 2, [http://books.google.com/books?id=4KZhv9y8sMIC&pg=PA450&lpg=PA450 p. 450]
 
* I was convinced that [[Lake Como]] was a large basin of water similar to the Tahoe, also surrounded by immense mountains whose slopes reach the shores, but here the lake is not a basin, since the banks are articulated like those of a stream and is a quarter or two thirds wide of the Mississippi. Along the coast there is not a single strip of flat land, but endless chains of mountains which suddenly emerge from the lake surface and rise towards the sky for one hundred or two hundred feet, constantly varying in shape. The rocky ridges are covered with numerous plant species and dotted with white villas that peek through lush foliage. Even on the top of the promontory we saw pretty little houses perched on picturesque pinnacles, more than a thousand feet above our heads.
** [[w:Mark Twain|Mark Twain]], "The innocents abroad", New York, 1896
 
Line 113 ⟶ 117:
***** ''Josh Billings' Old Farmer's Allminax'', [http://books.google.com/books?id=sUI1AAAAMAAJ&pg=PT30 "January 1871"]. Also in ''Everybody's Friend, or; Josh Billing's Encyclopedia and Proverbial Philosophy of Wit and Humor'' (1874), [http://books.google.com/books?id=7rA8AAAAYAAJ&pg=PA304 p. 304]
 
* The other night the view appeared even more surprising and picturesque. On the other side (of [[Lake Como]]) cliffs, trees and very white houses reflected their perfectly clear images on the lake and long beams of light, coming from distant windows, marked the motionless surface. Immediately next to it, great silver mansions under the moon shone among a thick dark and shapeless foliage, among the shadows that fell from the top of the cliffs and touched the lake edge where every stretch of the magical vision was reflected several times and with precision.
** [[w:Mark Twain|Mark Twain]], Cites in ''The innocents abroad'', John Camden Hotten, Londra, 1872
 
Line 129 ⟶ 133:
*** White subsequently reported this in "Mark Twain Amused," ''New York Journal'', 2 June 1897. White also recounts the incident in "Mark Twain as a Newspaper Reporter," ''The Outlook'', Vol. 96, 24 December 1910
** ''Variant'': I said - 'Say the report is greatly exaggerated'.
*** "Chapters from My Autobiography", ''The North American Review'', 21 September 1906, p. 160. Mark Twain
** ''Misquote'': The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.
*** Note: This paraphrase or misquote may be more popular than the original. <!--The joke is not original to Twain, having been used by [[Ulysses S. Grant]] in 1865.{{failed verification}}-->
Line 143 ⟶ 147:
 
* Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please.
** As quoted in [httphttps://web.archive.org/web/20181106220834/https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/k/kipling/rudyard/seatosea/chapter37.html "An Interview with Mark Twain"], ''From Sea to Sea: Letters of Travel'' (1899) by [[Rudyard Kipling]], Ch. 37, p. 180<!-- Doubleday & McClure Company. -->
** Commonly paraphrased as: "First get your facts, then you can distort them at your leisure."
 
Line 168 ⟶ 172:
 
* We believe that out of the public school grows the greatness of a nation.
** Address at a meeting of the Berkeley Lyceum, New York, November 23, 1900. Quoted in ''Mark Twain's Speeches'' (1910), ed. William Dean Howells, [http://books.google.com/books?id=7etXZ5Q17ngC&pg=PA146 p. 146] (The speech is titled "Public Education Association" in that book, but also referred to elsewhere as his "I am a Boxer" speech.)
 
* The silent colossal National Lie that is the support and confederate of all the tyrannies and shams and inequalities and unfairnesses that afflict the peoples — that is the one to throw bricks and sermons at.
Line 298 ⟶ 302:
** [http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/53b4cf90-7739-0132-f12c-58d385a7b928 Letter to Gertrude Natkin, 2 March 1906]
 
*The glory which is built upon a lie soon becomes a most unpleasant incumbrance. ... How easy it is to make people believe a lie, and how hard it is to undo that work again!
** Autobiographical dictation, 2 December 1906. Published in Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 2 (University of California Press, 2013)
 
* If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and a man.
** ''[https://www.gutenberg.org/files/102/102-h/102-h.htm#link2HCH0016 The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson]'' (1894), p. 214.
 
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:Wiederherstellungsbestrebungen.
:Waffenstillstandsunterhandlungen.<br />Of course when one of these grand mountain ranges goes stretching across the printed page, it adorns and ennobles that literary landscape,—but at the same time it is a great distress to the new student, for it blocks up his way; he cannot crawl under it, or climb over it or tunnel through it. So he resorts to the dictionary for help; but there is no help there. The dictionary must draw the line somewhere,—so it leaves this sort of words out. And it is right, because these long things are hardly legitimate words, but are rather combinations of words, and the inventor of them ought to have been killed.
*In German, a young lady has no sex, while a turnip has.
:*Appendix D, [http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Awful_German_Language The Awful German Language]
 
=== ''[[w:Adventures of Huckleberry Finn|Adventures of Huckleberry Finn]]'' (1885) ===
{{Main|Adventures of Huckleberry Finn}}
* Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.<br>BY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR.
** Notice
 
* 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.
** Ch. 1
 
* Jim was most ruined for a servant, because he got stuck up on account of having seen the devil and been rode by witches.
** Ch. 2
 
* We catched fish and talked, and we took a swim now and then to keep off sleepiness. It was kind of solemn, drifting down the big, still river, laying on our backs looking up at the stars, and we didn't ever feel like talking loud, and it warn't often that we laughed, only a little kind of a low chuckle. We had mighty good weather as a general thing, and nothing ever happened to us at all, that night, nor the next, nor the next.
** Ch. 12
 
* Well, then, says I, what's the use you learning to do right when it's troublesome to do right and ain't no trouble to do wrong, and the wages is just the same? I was stuck. I couldn't answer that. So I reckoned I wouldn't bother no more about it, but after this always do whichever come handiest at the time.
** Ch. 16
 
* ''Pilgrim's Progress'', about a man that left his family, it didn't say why. I read considerable in it now and then. The statements was interesting, but tough.
** Ch. 17
 
* There warn't anybody at the church, except maybe a hog or two, for there warn't any lock on the door, and hogs likes a puncheon floor in summer-time because it's cool. If you notice, most folks don't go to church only when they've got to; but a hog is different.
** Ch. 18
 
* We said there warn't no home like a raft, after all. Other places do seem so cramped up and smothery, but a raft don't. You feel mighty free and easy and comfortable on a raft.
** Ch. 18
 
* To be, or not to be; that is the bare bodkin.
** Ch. 21
 
* Everybody yelled at him, and laughed at him, and sassed him, and he sassed back, and said he'd attend to them and lay them out in their regular turns, but he couldn't wait now, because he'd come to town to kill old Colonel Sherburn, and his motto was, "Meat first, and spoon vittles to top off on."
** Ch. 21
 
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** Ch. 26
 
* I was a-trembling, because I'd got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself, "All right, then, I'll GO''go'' to hell."
** Ch. 31
 
* So there ain't nothing more to write about, and I am rotten glad of it, because if I'd a knowed what a trouble it was to make a book I wouldn't a tackled it and aint't agoing to no more. But I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she's going to adopt me and sivilize me and I can't stand it. I been there before.
** Ch. 43
 
=== ''Letter to Clara Spaulding'' (20 August 1886) ===
*There isn't time--so brief is life--for bickerings, apologies, heartburnings, callings to account. There is only time for loving--and but an instant, so to speak, for that.
 
=== ''[[w:A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court|A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court]]'' (1889) ===
{{Main|A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court}}
:<small>[http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/86 Full text online at Project Gutenberg] </small>
[[File:Connecticut Yankee4 new.jpg|thumb|You can't depend on your eyes when your [[imagination]] is out of focus.]]
*Why, it was like reading about France and the French, before the ever memorable and blessed Revolution, which swept a thousand years of such villany away in one swift tidal-wave of blood -- one: a settlement of that hoary debt in the proportion of half a drop of blood for each hogshead of it that had been pressed by slow tortures out of that people in the weary stretch of ten centuries of wrong and shame and misery the like of which was not to be mated but in hell. There were two "Reigns of Terror," if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the "horrors" of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror -- that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.
** [http://www.literature.org/authors/twain-mark/connecticut/chapter-13.html Ch. 13]
 
* My kind of loyalty was loyalty to one's country, not to its institutions or its officeholders. The country is the real thing, the substantial thing, the eternal thing; it is the thing to watch over, and care for, and be loyal to; institutions are extraneous, they are its mere clothing, and clothing can wear out, become ragged, cease to be comfortable, cease to protect the body from winter, disease, and death.  To be loyal to rags, to shout for rags, to worship rags, to die for rags—that is a loyalty of unreason, it is pure animal; it belongs to monarchy, was invented by monarchy; let monarchy keep it.  I was from Connecticut, whose Constitution declares "that all political power is inherent in the people, and all free governments are founded on their authority and instituted for their benefit; and that they have at all times an undeniable and indefeasible right to alter their form of government in such a manner as they may think expedient." <br /> Under that gospel, the citizen who thinks he sees that the commonwealth's political clothes are worn out, and yet holds his peace and does not agitate for a new suit, is disloyal; he is a traitor.  That he may be the only one who thinks he sees this decay, does not excuse him; it is his duty to agitate anyway, and it is the duty of the others to vote him down if they do not see the matter as he does. <br /> And now here I was, in a country where a right to say how the country should be governed was restricted to six persons in each thousand of its population.  For the nine hundred and ninety-four to express dissatisfaction with the regnant system and propose to change it, would have made the whole six shudder as one man, it would have been so disloyal, so dishonorable, such putrid black treason.  So to speak, I was become a stockholder in a corporation where nine hundred and ninety-four of the members furnished all the money and did all the work, and the other six elected themselves a permanent board of direction and took all the dividends.  It seemed to me that what the nine hundred and ninety-four dupes needed was a new deal. <!-- The thing that would have best suited the circus side of my nature would have been to resign the Boss-ship and get up an insurrection and turn it into a revolution; but I knew that the Jack Cade or the Wat Tyler who tries such a thing without first educating his materials up to revolution grade is almost absolutely certain to get left.  I had never been accustomed to getting left, even if I do say it myself. -->
** Ch. 13
 
* The pilgrims were human beings. Otherwise they would have acted differently. They had come a long and difficult journey, and now when the journey was nearly finished, and they learned that the main thing they had come for had ceased to exist, they didn't do as horses or cats or angle-worms would probably have done — turn back and get at something profitable — no, anxious as they had before been to see the miraculous fountain, they were as much as forty times as anxious now to see the place where it had used to be. There is no accounting for human beings.
** [http://www.literature.org/authors/twain-mark/connecticut/chapter-22.html Ch. 22]
 
* Many a small thing has been made large by the right kind of advertising.
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* Whenever the literary German dives into a sentence, that is the last you are going to see of him till he emerges on the other side of his Atlantic with his verb in his mouth.
** Ch. 22
 
* It is a mystery that is hidden from me by reason that the emergency requiring the fathoming of it hath not in my life-days occurred, and so, not having no need to know this thing, I abide barren of the knowledge.
** [http://www.literature.org/authors/twain-mark/connecticut/chapter-25.html Ch 25]
 
* You can't depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.
** Ch. 43
** [http://www.literature.org/authors/twain-mark/connecticut/chapter-43.html Ch. 43]
 
=== ''How To Tell A Story'' (1895) ===
Line 473 ⟶ 451:
 
=== ''[[w:Following the Equator|Following the Equator]]'' (1897) ===
{{Main|Following the Equator}}
* These wisdoms are for the luring of youth toward high moral altitudes. The author did not gather them from practice, but from observation. To be good is noble; but to show others how to be good is nobler and no trouble.
** The Pudd'nhead Maxims, preface
 
* When in doubt, tell the truth.
* She had run down and down and down, and had at last reached a point where medicines no longer had any helpful effect upon her. I said I knew I could put her upon her feet in a week. It brightened her up, it filled her with hope, and she said she would do everything I told her to do. So I said she must stop swearing and drinking, and smoking and eating for four days, and then she would be all right again. And it would have happened just so, I know it; but she said she could not stop swearing, and smoking, and drinking, because she had never done those things. So there it was. She had neglected her habits, and hadn't any. Now that they would have come good, there were none in stock. She had nothing to fall back on. She was a sinking vessel, with no freight in her to throw overboard and lighten ship withal.
** Ch. 2, Pudd’nhead Wilson’s New Calendar.
** Ch. I
 
* When in doubt, tell the truth.
** Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar, Ch. II
** Not in the text, but added by many sources is the sentence: "It will confound your enemies and astound your friends." Compare this line to the advice attributed to [[Henry Wotton]] (1568 - 1639) to a young diplomat "to tell the truth, and so puzzle and confound his enemies." ''E.g.'', Vol 24, Encyclopedia Britannica of Arts, Sciences, and General Literature, [https://books.google.com/books?id=_GlJAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA721&lpg=PA721&dq=truth+wotton+confound+advice&source=bl&ots=-cGk3UDLLj&sig=ltOR1xtI9WFic1JWKiFmIZ8Yce0&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjVkZCsj-jRAhXCyFQKHTmsCkAQ6AEIODAG#v=onepage&q=truth%20wotton%20confound%20advice&f=false page 721] (9th Ed. 1894)
 
* Prosperity is the best protector of principle.
** Ch. 38, Pudd’nhead Wilson’s New Calendar.
** Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar, Ch. II ; as cited in [https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Special:BookSources/0486473198 ''Mark Twain at your Fingertips'']: A Book of Quotations, ed. Caroline Thomas Hornsberger, Courier Corp. (2009), p. 385
 
* It is more trouble to make a maxim than it is to do right.
** Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar, Ch. III
 
* Noise proves nothing. Often a hen who has merely laid an egg cackles as if she had laid an asteroid.
** Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar, Ch. V
 
* '''Truth is the most valuable thing we have. Let us economize it.'''
** Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar, Ch. VII
 
* It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress.
** Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar, Ch. VIII
 
* There are those who scoff at the schoolboy, calling him frivolous and shallow: Yet it was the schoolboy who said "Faith is believing what you know ain't so."
** Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar, Ch. XII
 
* Truth is stranger than fiction — to some people, but I am measurably familiar with it.
** Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar, Ch. XV
 
* Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't.
** Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar, Ch. XV
*** Misquoted as "Why shouldn't truth be stranger than fiction? Fiction, after all, has to make sense." by Laurence J. Peter in "Peter's Quotations: Ideas for Our Time", among many others.
 
* It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either of them.
** Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar, Ch. XX
 
* Man will do many things to get himself loved; he will do all things to get himself envied.
** Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar, Ch. XXI
 
* "Classic." A book which people praise and don't read.
** Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar, Ch. XXV
 
* Man is the Only Animal that Blushes. Or needs to.
** Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar, Ch. XXVII
 
* Nearly all black and brown skins are beautiful, but a beautiful white skin is rare.
** Ch. XLI
 
* The only way to keep your health is to eat what you don't want, drink what you don't like, and do what you'd druther not.
** Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar, Ch. XLIX
 
* It is wonderful, the power of a faith like that, that can make multitudes upon multitudes of the old and weak and the young and frail enter without hesitation or complaint upon such incredible journeys and endure the resultant miseries without repining. It is done in love, or it is done in fear; I do not know which it is. No matter what the impulse is, the act born of it is beyond imagination marvelous to our kind of people, the cold whites.
** referencing the [[w:Kumbh Mela|Kumbh Mela]], Ch. XLIX
 
* '''This is indeed India!''' the land of dreams and romance, of fabulous wealth and fabulous poverty, of splendor and rags, of palaces and hovels, of famine and pestilence, of genii and giants and Aladdin lamps, of tigers and elephants, the cobra and the jungle, the country of a hundred nations and a hundred tongues, of a thousand religions and two million gods, cradle of the human race, birthplace of human speech, mother of history, grandmother of legend, great-grandmother of tradition, whose yesterdays bear date with the mouldering antiquities of the rest of the nations — the one sole country under the sun that is endowed with an imperishable interest for alien prince and alien peasant, for lettered and ignorant, wise and fool, rich and poor, bond and free, the one land that all men desire to see, and having seen once, by even a glimpse, would not give that glimpse for the shows of all the rest of the globe combined. '''Even now, after the lapse of a year, the delirium of those days in Bombay has not left me, and I hope never will.'''
** [http://www.gutenberg.org/files/5811/5811-h/5811-h.htm Ch. XXXVIII]
 
* By trying we can easily learn to endure adversity. Another man's, I mean.
** Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar, Ch. XXXIX
 
* Grief can take care of itself, but to get the full value of a joy you must have somebody to divide it with.
** Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar, Ch. XLVIII
 
* So far as I am able to judge, nothing has been left undone, either by man or Nature, to make India the most extraordinary country that the sun visits on his round. Nothing seems to have been forgotten, nothing overlooked.
** [http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2895/2895-h/p6.htm Ch. LVII]
 
* Don't part with your illusions. When they are gone you may still exist but you have ceased to live.
**Ch. LXII
 
*Jane Austen's books, too, are absent from this library. Just that one omission alone would make a fairly good library out of a library that hadn't a book in it.
** Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar, Ch. LIX
 
* Often, the surest way to convey misinformation is to tell the strict truth.
** Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar, Ch. LIX
 
* In the first place God made idiots. This was for practice. Then He made School Boards.
** Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar, Ch. LXI
 
* Every one is a moon, and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody.
** Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar, Ch. LXVI
 
* [[Famine in India|Famine]] is India's specialty. Elsewhere [[Famine|famines]] are inconsequential incidents — in India they are devastating cataclysms; in one case they annihilate hundreds; in the other, millions. <br> '''India has 2,000,000 gods, and worships them all. In religion all other countries are paupers; India is the only [[millionaire]].''' <br> With her everything is on a giant scale — even her poverty; no other country can show anything to compare with it. And she has been used to wealth on so vast a scale that she has to shorten to single words the expressions describing great sums.
** Mark Twain, ''Following the Equator'' (1897), [http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2895/2895-h/p5.htm Ch. XLIII]
 
* India had the start of the whole world in the beginning of things. She had the first civilization; she had the first accumulation of material wealth; she was populous with deep thinkers and subtle intellects; she had mines, and woods, and a fruitful soil. It would seem as if she should have kept the lead, and should be to-day not the meek dependent of an alien master, but mistress of the world, and delivering law and command to every tribe and nation in it. But, in truth, there was never any possibility of such supremacy for her.
** Mark Twain, ''Following the Equator'' (1897), Ch. XLIII
 
* '''So far as I am able to judge, nothing has been left undone, either by man or Nature, to make India the most extraordinary country that the sun visits on his round. Nothing seems to have been forgotten, nothing overlooked.''' Always, when you think you have come to the end of her tremendous specialties and have finished hanging tags upon her as the Land of the Thug, the Land of the Plague, the Land of Famine, the Land of Giant Illusions, the Land of Stupendous Mountains, and so forth, another specialty crops up and another tag is required. I have been overlooking the fact that India is by an unapproachable supremacy — the Land of Murderous Wild Creatures. '''Perhaps it will be simplest to throw away the tags and generalize her with one all-comprehensive name, as the Land of Wonders.'''
** Mark Twain, ''Following the Equator'' (1897), [http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2895/2895-h/p6.htm Ch. LVII]
 
=== "Which was the Dream?" (1898) ===
Line 745 ⟶ 639:
* Nature knows no indecencies; man invents them.
 
* Love seems the swiftest, but it is the slowest of all growths. No man or woman really knows what perfect love is until they have been married a quarter of a century.
 
* Death, the only immortal who treats us all alike, whose pity and whose peace and whose refuge are for all — the soiled and the pure, the rich and the poor, the loved and the unloved.
Line 780 ⟶ 674:
** p. 393
 
* Not a single right is indestructible: a new might can at any time abolish it, hence, man possesses not a single ''permanent'' right. <br> God is Might (and He is shifty, malicious, and uncertain).
** p. 394
 
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**p. 210
 
*The late [[Edgar Wilson Nye|Bill Nye]] once said "I have been told that [[Richard Wagner|Wagner]]'s music is better than it sounds."
**p. 288
 
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*...now...that I am a wise person. As for me, I wish there were some more of us in the world, for I find it lonesome.
**p. 281
 
* In 1847... the conversation fell upon Virginia and old times. I was present, but the group were probably quite unconscious of me, I being a lad and a negligeable quantity. Two of the group... had been of the audience when the [[w:Richmond, Virginia#Early United States|Richmond]] theatre burned down thirty-six years before, and they talked over the frightful details... and with their eyes I saw it all with an intolerable vividness... The picture is before me yet, and can never fade. ...[T]hree or four years later... I was king-bee and sole "subject" in the [[wikt:mesmerism#Noun|mesmeric]] show... I was trying to invent something fresh in the way of a vision... The vision developed by degrees, and gathered swing, momentum, energy! It was the Richmond fire. ...the fact stood proven that I had seen it in my vision. Lawks!<br />It is curious. When the magician's engagement closed there was but one person in the village who did not believe in mesmerism, and I was the one. All the others were converted, but I was to remain an implacable and unpersuadable disbeliever in mesmerism and hypnotism for close upon fifty years.
**pp. 301-302
 
* Thirty-five years after those old exploits... I visited my old mother; and being moved by what seemed... a rather heroic and noble impulse I thought I would... confess my ancient fault. ...To my astonishment... she was not moved in the least degree; she simply did not believe me...
**p. 302
 
* How easy it is to make people believe a lie, and how hard it is to undo that work again!
**p. 302
*** ''Misquote'': It's easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled.
 
*Carlyle said "a lie cannot live." It shows that he did not know how to tell them. If I had taken out a life policy on this one the premiums would have bankrupted me ages ago.
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** While this quote does appear in Twain's posthumous ''The Refuge of the Derelicts'' (1905), it had previously been published elsewhere.
** The earliest citation found in Google Books is a 1872 article by [[w:Richard Rogers Bowker|Richard Bowker]]: [https://books.google.com/books?id=YZgBAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA68&dq=The+lack+of+money+is+the+root+of+all+evil&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjWi5DE1crLAhUI3mMKHeSdB0YQ6AEIKzAB#v=onepage&q=%22lack%20of%20money%22&f=false "Our Crime Against Crimes"], in ''The Herald of Health'', vol. 19 no. 2, New York: Wood & Holbrook, February 1872. The saying is placed within quotation marks, perhaps indicating that it was already well-known.
** A precursor is found in the December 1859 edition of ''[https://books.google.com/books?id=gpdEAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA209&dq=The+lack+of+money+is+the+root+of+all+evil&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjWi5DE1crLAhUI3mMKHeSdB0YQ6AEINTAD#v=onepage&q=%22lack%20of%20gold%22&f=false Household Monthly]'': "It is very well to repeat, parrot-like, the old axiom that 'the love of gold is the root of all evil;' but it is very certain that in truth—the ''lack'' of gold is the great incentive to crime."
 
* '''It's not the size of the dog in the fight; it's the size of the fight in the dog.'''
** [[Anonymous]] American proverb; since 1998 this has often been attributed to Mark Twain on the internet, but no contemporary evidence of him ever using it has been located.
** Variants:
*** It is not the size of the dog in the fight that counts, but the fight in the dog that matters.
**** "Stub Ends of Thoughts" by Arthur G. Lewis, a collection of sayings, in ''Book of the Royal Blue'' Vol. 14, No. 7 (April 1911), cited as the earliest known occurrence in ''The Dictionary of Modern Proverbs'', edited by Charles Clay Doyle, Wolfgang Mieder, and Fred R. Shapiro, p. 232
*** It is not the size of the dog in the fight that counts, but the fight in the dog that wins.
**** Anonymous quote in the evening edition of the ''East Oregonian'' (20 April 1911)
*** What counts is not necessarily the size of the dog in the fight — it's the size of the fight in the dog.
**** [[Dwight D. Eisenhower]], declaring his particular variant on the proverbial assertion in [http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=11229 Remarks at Republican National Committee Breakfast (31 January 1958)]
 
* He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you.
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** Attributed to [[w:Markus Herz|Markus Herz]] by [[w:Ernst, Baron von Feuchtersleben|Ernst von Feuchtersleben]], ''Zur Diätetik der Seele'' (1841), [http://books.google.com/books?id=FLc6AAAAcAAJ&pg=PA95&dq=%22Lieber+Freund+Sie+werden+noch+einmal+an+einem+Druckfehler+sterben%22 p. 95]. First attributed to Twain in 1980s, as in ''The 637 best things anybody ever said'', (1982), Robert Byrne, Atheneum. See [[Talk:Mark_Twain#You_may_die_of_a_misprint|talk page]] for more info.
 
* When a child turns 12, he should be kept in a barrel and fed through the bunghole, until he reaches 16 ... at which time you plug the bunghole.
** Attributed to Twain but never sourced, this quotation should not be regarded as authentic.
 
* Describing her first day back in grade school after a long absence, a teacher said, "It was like trying to hold 35 corks under water at the same time."
** Incorrectly attributed to Twain, this is actually a quotation from an article in ''The Pocono Record'' (18 February 1971, [http://www.newspapers.com/newspage/40447792/ page 4])
 
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* Golf is a good walk spoiled.
** "Twain probably never uttered [these] words," according to R. Kent Rasmussen, editor of ''The Quotable Mark Twain'' (1998).
** "To play golf is to spoil an otherwise enjoyable walk" is found in H.S. Scrivener, [https://books.google.com/books?id=cYgCAAAAYAAJ&q=dicta#v=snippet&q=dicta&f=false "Memories of Men and Meetings"], in Arthur Wallis Myers (ed.) ''Lawn Tennis at Home and Abroad'' New York:Charles Scribner's Sons, 1903, p. 47. Scrivener attributes the aphorism to "my good friends the Allens". Reference from [http://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/05/28/golf-good-walk Quote Investigator].
 
* If voting made any difference, they wouldn't let us do it.
* ''Variant'': If voting changed anything, they'd make it illegal.
** Not by Twain, but from [[w:Philip Berrigan|Philip Berrigan]] and [[w:Emma Goldman|Emma Goldman]].<ref>{{cite web|url=https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/mark-twain-voting-quote/|title='If Voting Made a Difference, They Wouldn't Let Us Do It'|website=[[w:Snopes|Snopes]]|author=Dan Evon |date=May 24, 2016 |access-date=April 14, 2024}}</ref>
 
* I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time.
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* Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.
** [http://www.bartleby.com/73/1982.html Notes on sourcing]
** Twain did say:
:: "There is a sumptuous variety about the New England weather that compels the stranger's admiration — and regret. The weather is always doing something there ... In the spring I have counted one hundred and thirty-six different kinds of weather inside of four and twenty hours. ...<br>Yes, one of the brightest gems in the New England weather is the dazzling uncertainty of it."
::* Speech at the dinner of New England Society in New York City (22 December 1876)
Line 1,054 ⟶ 958:
**''Variant'': Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason
** Not found in Twain's works.
** A 1993 newspaper humor column attributes this saying to ''Reader's Digest'': "Picking it up from a Reader's Digest fan, Willie, our ex-shoe shine boy, says some politicians are like diapers. They both need changed often ... and for the same reason."<ref>Bill Hastings, [https://www.newspapers.com/newspage/14184165/ "Books, Bricks, Nap's, Tom, , Tres, Tracy ..."], ''Indiana Gazette'', 1993-09-10, p. 11</ref>
** Also attributed to ''Reader's Digest'' in Naomi Judd's 1993 book [https://books.google.com/books?id=AMmrqZkq3JQC&pg=PA262&dq=%22politicians+are+like+diapers%22&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiQ2obup6LKAhUBS2MKHfacCmsQ6AEIITAB#v=onepage&q=%22politicians%20are%20like%20diapers%22&f=false ''Love Can Build a Bridge'']: 'A quip I once saw in ''Reader's Digest'' said: "Most politicians are like diapers: they should be changed often, and for the same reason!"'.
** Attributed to 1992 congressional candidate [https://marktwainstudies.com/the-apocryphal-twain-politicians-are-like-diapers/ John Wallner]
** Not found attributed to Twain until [https://books.google.com/books?id=gNwqfJkXjVsC&pg=PA448&dq=%22politicians+are+like+diapers%22+twain&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjUq_C6qaLKAhVM7GMKHTuwAfIQ6AEIIzAB#v=onepage&q=%22politicians%20are%20like%20diapers%22%20twain&f=false 2010]
Line 1,068 ⟶ 972:
** Attested at least [https://books.google.ru/books?id=nUpWAAAAYAAJ&q=Ancients&pg=PA32 in 1780] (by [[s:John Hope (1739-1785)|John Hope]]):
*** Now, the Devil confound those Ancients, for they have stolen all my good thoughts from me!
 
* A good lawyer knows the law; a clever one takes the judge to lunch.
** Attributed to Twain but never sourced, this quotation should not be regarded as authentic.
 
* History does not repeat itself, but it rhymes
** Attributed to Mark Twain, without evidence. First occurenceoccurrence was in 1970<ref>{{cite web|url=https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/01/12/history-rhymes/|title=History Does Not Repeat Itself, But It Rhymes|website=[[Wikipedia:Quote Investigator]]}}</ref>
 
* When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much he had learned in seven years.
** Assessed as a probable misattribution by [[w:Quote Investigator|Quote Investigator]] [https://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/10/10/twain-father]
 
{{misattributed end}}
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** [[William Faulkner]], "Books and Things: American Drama: Inhibitions", in ''The Missippian'', March 1922
 
*If the writer is trying to interpret the meaning of life, all of what he writes is autobiographical. Think of Mark Twain, for example. You can tell from Twain's autobiography that Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn are versions, or imagined stages, of Twain himself. He was writing about his own life, about how it was or could have been. And he's still trying to reinterpret his life or to translate it when he is writing his autobiography, only he is not doing it with a mask anymore, rather as a testimony.
**[[Rosario Ferré]] interview in ''Backtalk: Women Writers Speak Out'' by Donna Marie Perry (1993)
 
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* I am persuaded that the future historian of America will find your works as indispensable to him as a French historian finds the political tracts of Voltaire.
** [[George Bernard Shaw]], letter to Mark Twain (3 July 1907), as quoted in Shelley Fisher Fishkin's Introduction to ''A Historical Guide to Mark Twain'' (Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 3
 
*Like [[Mark Twain]], [[Eugene Field]] was an ardent dissenter against the prevailing social order in private conversation, although not much of that dissent was found in his writings-nor in Twain's. Both of those men were born too soon, or perhaps were just naturally cautious of being combative in public. They were cast by Fate into a period which we know today as the era of rugged individualism-a nation marching behind a banner bearing the legend: "Self conquers all!" Meaning, of course, that it's up to you alone-a doctrine which practically everybody across the land took for granted, and one which hangs on in spite of its falsity. Yet Field and Twain occasionally exhibited signs of doubt and wrote satirical comment on American life. Field poked fun at the shallow culture of the Chicago pork packers, and Mark Twain indulged in brief outbursts of anarchistic protest. None of their onsets, however, was incisive enough to make the big financiers question their loyalty to the existing economic and social system.
**''[[Art Young]]: His Life and Times'' (1939)
 
*Mark Twain is a heroic figure in literature, and everybody who studies American literature or American history knows about Mark Twain as a great novelist. But how many people are taught in our schools or in our books that Mark Twain was a leader of the Anti-Imperialist League at the turn of the century? That he spoke out against the invasion of the Philippines?
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*{{commonscat-inline}}
* {{gutenberg author|id=Mark_Twain|name=Mark Twain}}
 
== Notes ==
{{Reflist}}
 
{{DEFAULTSORT:Twain, Mark}}
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[[Category:People from California]]
[[Category:Journalists from the United States]]
[[Category:AmericanPublishers publishersfrom the United States]]
[[Category:Critics from the United States]]
[[Category:Abolitionists]]
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