Mark Twain

Principles have no real force except when one is well-fed.

What is Man? Man is a noisome bacillus whom Our Heavenly Father created because he was disappointed in the monkey.

Education consists mainly of what we have unlearned.

It is easier to stay out than get out.

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.

It’s no wonder that truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense.

Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life. (The conviction of the rich that the poor are happier is no more foolish than the conviction of the poor that the rich are.)

No dog ever peed on a moving car.

People seldom do what they believe in. They do what is convenient, then repent.

I’ve always thought that each person invented himself… for whatever reason, through whatever circumstance, through whatever he is gone through… that we are each a figment of our own imagination… And some people have a greater ability to imagine than others.

A human being has a natural desire to have more of a good thing than he needs.

If the human mind was simple enough to understand, we’d be too simple to understand it.

The problem is that for women, the average time is just over 14 minutes… men are left with about 12 minutes during which time they need to think of something to do!

Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt.

Be ready to revise any system, scrap any method, abandon any theory, if the success of the job requires it.

The most interesting information come from children, for they tell all they know and then stop.

All heiresses are beautiful.

Fate is being kind to me. Fate doesn’t want me to be too famous too young.

[on Diana’s Death] Disbelief, refused to accept it.

I have been at it ten years. I collect them so that they will not be lost to America. We have no Egyptian mummies here, nor any relics of the Battle of Waterloo nor any curios from Pompeii. It is strictly American.

Roaming through the jungle of ‘oohs’ and ‘ahs’, searching for a more agreeable noise, I live a life of primitivity with the mind of a child and an unquenchable thirst for sharps and flats.