Mark Twain

The human race has one really effective weapon, and that is laughter.

Whoever has lived long enough to find out what life is, knows how deep a debt of gratitude we owe to Adam, the first great benefactor of our race. He brought death into the world.

The newspaper that obstructs the law on a trivial pretext, for money’s sake, is a dangerous enemy to the public weal.That awful power, the public opinion of a nation, is created in America by a horde of ignorant, self-complacent simpletons who failed at ditching and shoemaking and fetched up in journalism on their way to the poorhouse.

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

I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.

I don’t know of a single foreign product that enters this country untaxed, except the answer to prayer.

It is just like man’s vanity and impertinence to call an animal dumb because it is dumb to his dull perceptions.

I never hurt nobody but myself and that’s nobody’s business but my own.

It is true that I am often startled and even angered and repulsed by the strange directions and provocative content of new forms that seem to pop up every few months.

When you allow a person’s words to upset you, you’re giving away your power.

You know I don’t wanna come on ungrateful, but that warren report, you know as well as me, just didn’t make it. You know, like they might as well have asked some banana salesman from des moines, who was up in toronto on the big day, if he saw anyone around looking suspicious…

Scriptures, n.: The sacred books of our holy religion, as distinguished from the false and profane writings on which all other faiths are based.

Procrastination is the art of keeping up with yesterday.

Wagon Train was on. It seemed to be beaming in from some foreign country. I shut that off, too, and went into another room, a windowless one with a painted door – a dark cavern with a floor-to-ceiling library. I switched on the lamps. The place had an overpowering presence of literature and you couldn’t help but lose your passion for dumbness.

Scream in silence. Dance in stillness.

Nature has no mercy at all. Nature says, I’m going to snow. If you have on a bikini and no snowshoes, that’s tough. I am going to snow anyway.

I am not prejudiced in any way.

Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism — how passionately I hate them!

A man can’t ‘just be friends’ with another woman. Period.

True freedom is being free from the search for freedom.

Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought.