Mark Twain: Trending quotes (page 6)

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“…a revolutionist in my sympathies, by birth, by breeding and by principle. I am always on the side of the revolutionists, because there never was a revolution unless there were some oppressive and intolerable conditions against which to revolute…”

Mark Twain

Source: Autobiography of Mark Twain, Vol. 3 (2015), p. 451

Birth

“A crowded police docket is the surest of all signs that trade is brisk and money plenty.”

Mark Twain book Roughing It

Roughing It (published 1872)
Roughing It (1872)

Money

“The Blessings-of-Civilization Trust, wisely and cautiously administered, is a Daisy. There is more money in it, more territory, more sovereignty, and other kinds of emolument, than there is in any other game that is played. But Christendom has been playing it badly of late years, and must certainly suffer by it, in my opinion. She has been so eager to get every stake that appeared on the green cloth, that the People who Sit in Darkness have noticed it -- they have noticed it, and have begun to show alarm. They have become suspicious of the Blessings of Civilization.”

Mark Twain

To the Person Sitting in Darkness http://xroads.virginia.edu/~drbr/sitting.html (1901)

Money , People , Game , Suffering

“Customs do not concern themselves with right or wrong or reason. But they have to be obeyed; one reasons all around them until he is tired, but he must not transgress them, it is sternly forbidden.”

Mark Twain

The Gorky Incident (1906)

“The best of us would rather be popular than right.”

Mark Twain

No. 44, the Mysterious Stranger (unpublished manuscript written 1902–1908)

“There has never been a Protestant boy nor a Protestant girl whose mind the Bible has not soiled.”

Mark Twain

Source: Autobiography of Mark Twain, Vol. 2 (2013), p. 135

Girl , Boy

“Enough, enough, enough! Say no more! Lump the whole thing! say that the Creator made Italy from designs by Michael Angelo!”

Mark Twain book The Innocents Abroad

Source: The Innocents Abroad (1869), Ch. 27

“…why doesn't somebody write a tract on "How to Be a Christian and yet keep your Hands off of Other People's Things."”

Mark Twain

Source: Autobiography of Mark Twain, Vol. 3 (2015), p. 222

People

“When the doctrine of allegiance to party can utterly up-end a man's moral constitution and make a temporary fool of him besides, what excuse are you going to offer for preaching it, teaching it, extending it, perpetuating it? Shall you say, the best good of the country demands allegiance to party? Shall you also say it demands that a man kick his truth and his conscience into the gutter, and become a mouthing lunatic, besides?”

Mark Twain

"Consistency", paper read at the Hartford Monday Evening Club on 5 December 1887. The Complete Essays of Mark Twain, p. 582 http://books.google.com/books?id=sujuHO_fvJgC&pg=PA582&dq=%22When+the+doctrine+of+allegiance%22 (First published in the 1923 edition of Mark Twain's Speeches, ed. Albert Bigelow Paine, pp. 120-130, where it is incorrectly dated "following the Blaine-Cleveland campaign, 1884." (See Mark Twain's Notebooks & Journals (1979), ed. Frederick Anderson, Vol. 3, p. 41, footnote 92 http://books.google.com/books?id=kMbeUm4pJwsC&pg=PA41) Many reprints repeat Paine's dating.)

Truth , Fools , Country

“France has neither winter nor summer nor morals. Apart from these drawbacks it is a fine country.”

Mark Twain

Mark Twain's Notebook (1935)

Winter , Summer , Country

“I am always reading immoral books on the sly, and then selfishly trying to prevent other people from having the same wicked good time.”

Mark Twain

Source: Autobiography of Mark Twain, Vol. 2 (2013), p. 475

People , Books , Time , Reading

“Definition of a classic — something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.”

Mark Twain

Quoting or paraphrasing a Professor Winchester in "Disappearance of Literature" http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/etcbin/toccer-new2?id=TwaSpee.sgm&images=images/modeng&data=/texts/english/modeng/parsed&tag=public&part=52&division=div1, speech at the Nineteenth Century Club, New York, 20 November 1900, in Mark Twain's Speeches (1910), ed. William Dean Howells, p. 194 http://books.google.com/books?id=7etXZ5Q17ngC&pg=PA194
Variant: A classic – something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.

Reading

“Man has been here 32,000 years. That it took a hundred million years to prepare the world for him is proof that that is what it was done for. I suppose it is, I dunno. If the Eiffel Tower were now representing the world's age, the skin of paint on the pinnacle-knob at its summit would represent man's share of that age; and anybody would perceive that the skin was what the tower was built for. I reckon they would, I dunno.”

Mark Twain

Was the World Made for Man? (1903): also p. 106, What is man?: and other philosophical writings, Volume 19 of Works, 1993, Mark Twain, Paul Baender, University of California Press

Age , World , Painting

“There isn't anything so grotesque or so incredible that the average human being can't believe it.”

Mark Twain

Source: Autobiography of Mark Twain, Vol. 2 (2013), p. 136

“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.”

Mark Twain

Memorandum written on his deathbed
Mark Twain's Notebook (1935)

Love , Death , Peace

“She makes me get up just at the same time every morning; she makes me wash, they comb me all to thunder; she won't let me sleep in the woodshed; I got to wear them blamed clothes that just smothers me, Tom; they don't seem to let any air git through 'em, somehow; and they're so rotten nice that I can't set down, nor lay down, nor roll around anywher's; I hain't slid on a cellar-door for — well, it 'pears to be years; I got to go to church and sweat and sweat — I hate them ornery sermons! I can't ketch a fly in there, I can't chaw. I got to wear shoes all Sunday. The widder eats by a bell; she goes to bed by a bell; she gits up by a bell — everything's so awful reg'lar a body can't stand it.”

Mark Twain book The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

Source: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), Ch. 35

Hate , Shoe , Sleep , Time

“It is more trouble to make a maxim than it is to do right.”

Mark Twain book Following the Equator

Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar, Ch. III
Following the Equator (1897)

“Try as you may, you don't get down as you would from a horse, you get down as you would from a house afire. You make a spectacle of yourself every time.”

Mark Twain

"Taming the Bicycle" (1917)

Time , Horse , Housing

“It [the press] has scoffed at religion till it has made scoffing popular. It has defended official criminals, on party pretexts, until it has created a United States Senate whose members are incapable of determining what crime against law and the dignity of their own body is—they are so morally blind—and it has made light of dishonesty till we have as a result a Congress which contracts to work for a certain sum and then deliberately steals additional wages out of the public pocket and is pained and surprised that anybody should worry about a little thing like that.”

Mark Twain

"License of the Press", an address before the Monday Evening Club, Hartford (1873)

Pain , Religion , Law , Light

“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.”

Mark Twain book Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Source: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), Ch. 18

Time , Summer