Mark Twain

More than once I had seen a noble who had gotten his enemy at a disadvantage stop to pray before cutting his throat.

We must annex those people. We can afflict them with our wise and beneficent government. We can introduce the novelty of thieves, all the way up from street-car pickpockets to municipal robbers and Government defaulters, and show them how amusing it is to arrest them and try them and then turn them loose – some for cash and some for political influence. We can make them ashamed of their simple and primitive justice. We can make that little bunch of sleepy islands the hottest corner on earth, and array it in the moral splendor of our high and holy civilization. Annexation is what the poor islanders need. Shall we to men benighted, the lamp of life deny?

There isn’t a single human characteristic that can be safely labeled as American.

Apparently there is nothing that cannot happen today.

I refused to attend his funeral. But I wrote a very nice letter explaining that I approved of it.

Fueling your body is a process… The secret of getting ahead is getting started.

Thought is the sculptor who can create the person you want to be.

Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet.

It’s all that the young can do for the old, to shock them and keep them up to date.

No God and no religion can survive ridicule. No political church, no nobility, no royalty or other fraud, can face ridicule in a fair field, and live.

Nothing does Reason more Right, than the Coolness of those that offer it: for Truth often suffers more by the heat of its defenders than from the arguments of its opposers.

Anger is short madness

Do something every day that you don’t want to do. This is the golden rule for acquiring the habit of doing your duty without pain.

It always seems impossible until it is done.

The progress of rivers to the ocean is not so rapid as that of man to error.

Look before you leap for as you sow, ye are like to reap.

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.

Is not a patron, my lord, one who looks with unconcern on a man struggling for life in the water, and, when he has reached ground, encumbers him with help? The notice which you have been pleased to take of my labors, had it been early, had been kind; but it has been delayed till I am indifferent, and cannot enjoy it; till I am solitary, and cannot impart it; till I am known, and do not want it.

All this worldly wisdom was once the unamiable heresy of some wise man.

A man who exposes himself when he is intoxicated, has not the art of getting drunk.

There is no odor so bad as that which arises from goodness tainted.