Mark Twain
real name Samuel L. Clemens; American author; b. 1835; d. 1910
Aphorisms Attributed to This Aphorist
21–35 (35)
tiny.ag/edsop9bf · submitted 1997
The human race has one really effective weapon, and that is laughter.
tiny.ag/7do2rifh · submitted 1997
The fact that man knows right from wrong proves his intellectual superiority to other creatures; but the fact that he can do wrong proves his moral inferiority to any creature that cannot.
Mark Twain, What is Man?, 1906, in Altruism and Cynicism
tiny.ag/mwoxawkr · submitted 1997
Reader, suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.
tiny.ag/mwkuerjp · submitted 1997
Noise proves nothing. Often a hen who has merely laid an egg cackles as if she had laid an asteroid.
tiny.ag/ne1vhxlr · submitted 1997
Never tell the truth to those unworthy of it.
tiny.ag/gymh6otw · submitted 1997
Man is the only animal that blushes -- or needs to.
tiny.ag/yh5kxuzq · submitted 1997
Loyalty to petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul.
Mark Twain, (inscription beneath his bust in the Hall of Fame), in Law and Politics
tiny.ag/maz6ijau · submitted 1997
Life is but a dream, a grotesque and foolish dream.
Mark Twain, The Mysterious Stranger, in Life and Death
tiny.ag/q2py4esl · submitted 1997
Let us so live that when we come to die, even the undertaker will be sorry.
Mark Twain, in Life and Death and Vice and Virtue
tiny.ag/okkjfcye · submitted 1997
Just the omission of Jane Austen's books alone would make a fairly good library out of a library that hadn't a book in it.
tiny.ag/2guiksyw · submitted 1997
It usually takes more than three weeks to prepare a good impromptu speech.
tiny.ag/zzcxms0q · submitted 1997
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.
tiny.ag/r0a9zwmr · submitted 1997
In Paris they simply stared when I spoke to them in French; I never did succeed in making those idiots understand their language.
tiny.ag/mbwozhf6 · submitted 1997
If you tell the truth you don't have to remember anything.
tiny.ag/qnvx9otp · submitted 1997
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.
21–35 (35)