Mark Twain

I never could tell a lie that anybody would doubt, nor a truth that anybody would believe.

If you don’t like the weather in New England, just wait a few minutes.

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?

Everything has its limit – iron ore cannot be educated into gold.

You can’t depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.

Whiskey is for drinking; water is for fighting over.

While fools shun one set of faults they run into the opposite one.

The first farmer was the first man. All historic nobility rests on the possession and use of land.

It requires a great deal of boldness and a great deal of caution to make a great fortune, and when you have it, it requires ten times as much skill to keep it.

By all means let’s be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.

There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.

It was wonderful to find America, but it would have been more wonderful to miss it.

The greatest homage we can pay truth is to use it.

It were endless to dispute upon everything that is disputable.

Be better. Be better at everything. Be better fathers… Men can be better husbands, which is – be a part of your family’s life. Do the dishes. Don’t babysit your children. You don’t babysit your own children. Be engaged. Don’t just think going to work and coming home makes you a man. Being a father, being engaged, all that stuff is important. Be a better employer. When you are sitting at a seat of power at a table of any kind and you look around you just see you, it’s just you and a bunch of men around a table, on a golf course, making deals, and you allow that to happen, and you’re okay with that – be better.

We have to face the fact that either all of us are going to die together or we are going to learn to live together, and if we are to live together we have to talk.

Whatever limits us we call fate.

We want a few mad people now. See where the sane ones have landed us!

Be careful the environment you choose for it will shape you; be careful the friends you choose for you will become like them.

Make the most of yourself, for that is all there is of you.

Often the surest way to convey misinformation is to tell the strict truth.