Mark Twain
It is by the fortune of God that, in this country, we have three benefits: freedom of speech, freedom of thought, and the wisdom never to use either.
The human race is a race of cowards; and I am not only marching in that procession but carrying a banner.
I thoroughly disapprove of duels. If a man should challenge me, I would take him kindly and forgivingly by the hand and lead him to a quiet place and kill him.
God made the Idiot for practice, and then He made the School Board.
Don't go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first.
We have a criminal jury system which is superior to any in the world; and its efficiency is only marred by the difficulty of finding twelve men every day who don't know anything and can't read.
Reader, suppose you were an idiot; and suppose you were a member of Congress; but I repeat myself.
Truth is the most valuable thing we have. Let us economize it.
Never put off till tomorrow what you can do the day after tomorrow.
The proper office of a friend is to side with you when you are wrong. Nearly anybody will side with you when you are right.
When angry, count a hundred; when very angry, swear.
Good breeding consists in concealing how much we think of ourselves and how little we think of the other person.
Everything human is pathetic. The secret source of humor itself is not joy but sorrow. There is no humor in heaven.
Give an Irishman lager for a month, and he's a dead man. An Irishman is lined with copper, and beer corrodes it. But whiskey polishes the copper and is the saving of him.
They spell it Vinci and pronounce it Vinchy; foreigners always spell better than they pronounce.
What would men be without women? Scarce, sir, mighty scarce.
Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.
Repartee is something we think of twenty-four hours too late.
No sinner is ever saved after the first twenty minutes of a sermon.
Familiarity breeds contempt. How accurate that is. The reason we hold truth in such respect is because we have so little opportunity to get familiar with it.
Civilization is the limitless multiplication of unnecessary necessities.
All you need is ignorance and confidence and the success is sure.
It can probably be shown through facts and figures that there is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress.
War talk by men who have been in a war is always interesting; whereas moon talk by a poet who has not been in the moon is likely to be dull.
Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example.
Hain't we got all the fools in town on our side? And ain't that a big enough majority in any town?
Whenever the literary German dives into a sentence, that is the last you are going to see of him till he emerges on the other side of his Atlantic with his verb in his mouth.
A verb has a hard time enough of it in this world when its all together. It's downright inhuman to split it up. But that's what those Germans do. They take part of a verb and put it down here, like a stake, and they take the other part of it and put it away over yonder like another stake, and between these two limits they put German.