Mark Twain

Never tell the truth to people who are not worthy of it.

The trouble ain’t that there is too many fools, but that the lightning ain’t distributed right.

A monarch, when good, is entitled to the consideration which we accord to a pirate who keeps Sunday School between crimes; when bad, he is entitled to none at all.

A good memory and a tongue tied in the middle is a combination which gives immortality to conversation.

We have the best government that money can buy.

My parents were neither very poor nor conspicuously honest.

True genius resides in the capacity for evaluation of uncertain, hazardous, and conflicting information.

What quarrel, what harshness, what unbelief in each other can subsist in the presence of a great calamity, when all the artificial vesture of our life is gone, and we are all one with each other in primitive mortal needs?

The maxim of the British people is Business as usual.

Every person is a God in embryo. Its only desire is to be born.

Natural abilities are like natural plants, that need pruning by study; and studies themselves do give forth directions too much at large, except they be bounded in by experience.

Every fact is related on one side to sensation, and, on the other, to morals. The game of thought is, on the appearance of one of these two sides, to find the other; given the upper, to find the under side.

Never waste jealousy on a real man: it is the imaginary man that supplants us all in the long run.

When I hear the hypercritical quarreling about grammar and style, the position of the particles, etc., etc., stretching or contracting every speaker to certain rules of theirs. I see that they forget that the first requisite and rule is that expression shall be vital and natural, as much as the voice of a brute or an interjection: first of all, mother tongue; and last of all, artificial or father tongue. Essentially your truest poetic sentence is as free and lawless as a lamb’s bleat.

Find people who will make you better.

The happiest women, like the happiest nations, have no history.

Why was the human race created? Or at least why wasn’t something creditable created in place of it? God had His opportunity. He could have made a reputation. But no, He must commit this grotesque folly – a lark which must have cost Him a regret or two when He came to think it over and observe effects.

The American Constitution, one of the few modern political documents drawn up by men who were forced by the sternest circumstances to think out what they really had to face, instead of chopping logic in a university classroom.

Don’t try to solve serious matters in the middle of the night.

God’s first creature, which was light.

We need not worry so much about what man descends from; it’s what he descends to that shames the human race.