Mark Twain
Mark Twain
Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better known by his pen name Mark Twain, was an American writer. Among his novels are The Adventures of Tom Sawyerand its sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the latter often called "The Great American Novel"...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth30 November 1835
CountryUnited States of America
believe government politics
When politics enter into municipal government, nothing resulting therefrom in the way of crimes and infamies is then incredible. It actually enables one to accept and believe the impossible...
achievement dollars politics
...one of the first achievements of the legislature was to institute a ten-thousand-dollar agricultural fair to show off forty dollars' worth of pumpkins in - however, the Territorial legislature was usually spoken of as the "asylum".
office political politics
The new political gospel: public office is private graft.
soul patriotism substance
The soul and substance of what customarily ranks as patriotism is moral cowardice -- and always has been.
cheer boys hands
We teach them to take their patriotism at second-hand; to shout with the largest crowd without examining into the right or wrong of the matter -- exactly as boys under monarchies are taught and have always been taught. We teach them to regard as traitors, and hold in aversion and contempt, such as do not shout with the crowd, and so here in our democracy we are cheering a thing which of all things is most foreign to it and out of place -- the delivery of our political conscience into somebody else's keeping. This is patriotism on the Russian plan.
patriotism majority
...majority Patriotism is the customary Patriotism.
men patriotism he-man
Patriotism is usually the refuge of the scoundrel. He is the man who talks the loudest.
marriage husband wife
If husbands could realize what large returns of profit may be gotten out of a wife by a small word of praise paid over the counter when the market is just right, they would bring matters around the way they wish them much oftener than they usually do. Arguments are unsafe with wives, because they examine them; but they do not examine compliments. One can pass upon a wife a compliment that is three-fourths base
leadership learning writing
If we learned to walk and talk the way we learn to read and write, everyone would limp and stutter.
school knowledge college
All schools, all colleges, have two great functions: to confer, and to conceal, valuable knowledge. The theological knowledge which they conceal cannot justly be regarded as less valuable than that which they reveal. That is, when a man is buying a basket of strawberries it can profit him to know that the bottom half of it is rotten.
real knowledge wonderful
For all the talk you hear about knowledge being such a wonderful thing, instinct is worth forty of it for real unerringness.
knowledge otters rose
Information appears to stew out of me naturally, like the precious otter of roses out of the otter.
humor inability remember
The inability to forget is far more devastating than the inability to remember.
laughter humor appreciate
English humor is hard to appreciate, though, unless you are trained to it. The English papers, in reporting my speeches, always put 'laughter' in the wrong place.