Quotes

Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; personsattempting to find a moral in it will bebanished; persons attempting to find a plot in itwill be shot.

All the modern inconveniences.

We have not the reverent feeling for therainbow that a savage has, because we know how it is made. We have lost as much as we gained by prying into that matter.

What chance has the ignorant, uncultivated liar against the educated expert? What chance have I . . . against a lawyer?

In the matter of intellect the ant must bea strangely overrated bird. During manysummers, now, I have watched him, whenI ought to have been in better business, andI have not yet come across a living ant thatseemed to have any more sense than a deadone. I refer to the ordinary ant, of course; I have had no experience of those wonderfulSwiss and African ones which vote, keep drilled armies, hold slaves, and dispute about religion.

A pretty air in an opera is prettier there than it could be anywhere else, I suppose, just as anhonest man in politics shines more than hewould elsewhere.

The widder eats by a bell; she goes to bed by abell; she gits up by a bell—everything’s so awful reg’lar a body can’t stand it.

Anywhere is better than Paris. Paris the cold, Paris the drizzly, Paris the rainy, Paris theDamnable. More than a hundred years ago, somebody asked Quin, “Did you ever see such a winter in all your life before?” “Yes,” said he, “last summer.” I judge he spent his summer in Paris.

Tom appeared on the sidewalk with a bucketof whitewash and a long-handled brush. Hesurveyed the fence, and all gladness left himand a deep melancholy settled down upon hisspirit. Thirty yards of board fence nine feethigh. Life to him seemed hollow, and existencebut a burden.

He [Tom Sawyer] had discovered a great law ofhuman action, without knowing it—namely, that in order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain. If he had been a great andwise philosopher, like the writer of this book, he would now have comprehended that Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do andthat Play consists of whatever a body is notobliged to do.

The chances are that a man cannot get into congress now without resorting to arts and means that should render him unfit to gothere.

The Gilded Age.

To my mind Judas Iscariot was nothing but a low, mean, premature Congressman.

[ On women in the United States :] They live in the midst of a country where there is no end to the laws and no beginning to the execution of them.

The jury system puts a ban upon intelligenceand honesty, and a premium upon ignorance, stupidity, and perjury.

When the peremptory challenges wereall exhausted, a jury of twelve men wereimpaneled—a jury who swore that they hadneither heard, read, talked about, nor expressedan opinion concerning a murder which thevery cattle in the corrals, the Indians in thesage-brush, and the stones in the street werecognizant of!

To do something, say something, seesomething, before anybody else—these are things that confer a pleasure compared with which other pleasures are tame and commonplace, other ecstasies cheap and trivial.

[ Deleted dedication of Twain’s book RoughingIt:] To the Late Cain, This Book is Dedicated, Not on account of respect for his memory, for it merits little respect; not on accountof sympathy with him, for his bloody deedplaced him without the pale of sympathy, strictly speaking; but out of a mere humancommiseration for him in that it was hismisfortune to live in a dark age that knew notthe beneficent Insanity Plea.

The serene confidence which a Christian feels in four aces.

If I were settled I would quit all nonsense & swindle some girl into marrying me. But Iwouldn’t expect to be “worthy” of her. I wouldn’t have a girl that I was worthy of. She wouldn’t do. She wouldn’t be respectable enough.

Having looked the past in the eye, having asked for forgiveness and having made amends, letus shut the door on the past—not in order to forget it but in order not to allow it to imprison us.

I have often noticed that you shun exertion.There comes the difference between us. I courtexertion. I love work. Why, sir, when I have apiece of work to perform, I go away to myself, sit down in the shade, and muse over thecoming enjoyment.

The drawing shows me at a glance what would be spread over ten pages in a book.

There is no peace in Southern Africa. There is no peace because there is no justice.

I don’t adopt any one’s ideas; I have my own.

A nihilist is a man who does not bow down before any authority, who does not take any principle on faith, whatever reverence thatprinciple may be enshrined in.

There is nothing new in the world except the history you do not know.

[ On General Douglas MacArthur :] I fired himbecause he wouldn’t respect the authority ofthe President. That’s the answer to that. I didn’t fire him because he was a dumb son of a bitch, although he was, but that’s not against the lawfor generals. If it was, half to three-quarters ofthem would be in jail.

I’ve just read your lousy review [of a concert by Truman’s daughter, Margaret]. I’ve come to the conclusion that you are an “eight ulcer man on four ulcer pay.” It seems to me that you are afrustrated old man who wishes he could have been successful. When you write such poppycock as was in the back section of the paperyou work for it shows conclusively that you’reoff the beam and at least four of your ulcersare at work. Some day I hope to meet you.When that happens you’ll need a new nose, alot of beefsteak for black eyes, and perhaps asupporter below!

Now they accuse me of going up and down the Nation on a whistlestop train, and the slogansthat they hurl at me most of the time are “Give’em hell, Harry.” That reputation I did not earn. All I do is to tell them [the Republicans] thetruth, and that hurts a lot worse than giving them hell.

The Government has been informed that a Jewish state has been proclaimed in Palestine, and recognition has been requested by the provisional government thereof. The United States recognizes the provisional government of the de facto authority of the new state of Israel.

Every segment of our population and every individual has a right to expect from ourGovernment a fair deal.

Sixteen hours ago an American airplane dropped one bomb on Hiroshima. . . . It is a harnessing of the basic powers of the universe. The force from which the sun draws its powers has been loosed against those who brought war to the Far East.

I believe that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities orby outside pressures.

It was the supreme expression of themediocrity of the apparatus that Stalin himselfrose to his position.

[ After the death of President Franklin D.Roosevelt :] When they told me yesterday what had happened, I felt like the moon, the stars, and all the planets had fallen on me.

The Literary “Fellow Travelers” of the Revolution.

If men were equal to-morrow and all wore thesame coats, they would wear different coats thenext day.

[ Concluding words of the Barsetshire novels :] To meBarset has been a real county, and its city a real city, and the spires and towers have been before my eyes, and the voices of the people are knownto my ears, and the pavement of the city ways are familiar to my footsteps. . . . I have been induced to wander among them too long by my love of old friendships, and by the sweetness of old faces.

What was it the French Minister said. If it issimply difficult it is done. If it is impossible, it shall be done.

Not until I went into the churches of Americaand heard her pulpits flame with righteousness did I understand the secret of her genius andpower. America is great because America is good, and if America ever ceases to be good America will cease to be great.

It is not the prize that can make us happy; it is not even the winning of the prize. . . . [It is] the struggle, the long hot hour of the honest fight. . . . There is no human bliss equal to twelvehours of work with only six hours in which todo it.

All those who seek to destroy the liberties of ademocratic nation ought to know that war is the surest and the shortest means to accomplish it.

If ever America undergoes great revolutions, they will be brought about by the presence of the black race on the soil of the United States; that is to say, they will owe their origin, not to the equality, but to the inequality of condition.

In no country in the world is the love of property more active and more anxious than in the United States; nowhere does the majority display less inclination for those principles which threaten to alter, in whatever manner, the laws of property.

The love of wealth is therefore to be traced, as either a principal or an accessory motive, at the bottom of all that the Americans do; this gives to all their passions a sort of family likeness.

If I were asked . . . to what the singularprosperity and growing strength of that people[the Americans] ought mainly to be attributed, I should reply: To the superiority of their women.

I believe that [in the United States] the socialchanges that bring nearer to the same level the father and son, the master and servant, and, in general, superiors and inferiors will raise woman and make her more and more the equal of man.