“I have been studying the traits and dispositions of the "lower animals" (so called) and contrasting them with the traits and dispositions of man. I find the result humiliating to me.”
Source: Letters from the Earth: Uncensored Writings
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Mark Twain 637
American author and humorist 1835–1910Related quotes

http://cain.ulst.ac.uk/issues/politics/union/fcchap2.htm

Source: What Time's the Next Swan? (1962), Ch. 1, p. 3
Context: In that wonderful musical show Knickerbocker Holiday Maxwell Anderson defined the outstanding characteristics of an American as "one who refuses to take orders!"
I think that I qualified for that, my chosen nationality, at an early age. As far back as I can remember, an expressly given order triggered instant defiance. My little mind started functioning like an IBM machine; signals flashed in my resistance center, lights flickered around my resentment glands, bell and buzzer alerted all the cunning of a five-year-old.
Strategy and tactics went to work, not to rest till they had circumvented or defied that specific order.
I don't know if that character trait was deplorable or laudable; I only know that I have never been able to lose it. And I am extremely grateful that I was too young to serve in the First World War and too old for the Second; I surely would have been court-martialed for insubordination, and expired in front of a firing squad.
Even today, at my ripe old age, if someone suggests I do something and this suggestion is tinged with an excessive amount of authority, I immediately turn into a bristling fortress of resistance.

“To find everything profound — that is an inconvenient trait.”
Sec. 158
The Gay Science (1882)
Context: To find everything profound — that is an inconvenient trait. It makes one strain one's eyes all the time, and in the end one finds more than one might have wished.

April 18, 1867.
Letters to Carl Nägeli

““You can hardly blame them.”
“Assuming stupidity is an inherited trait, then no, I can’t.””
Source: Revelation Space (2000), Chapter 3 (p. 67).

Nobel Banquet Speech (10 December 1929) http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1929/mann-speech.html