Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Mark Twain
We are by long odds the most ill-mannered nation, civilized or savage, that exists on the planet to-day, and our President stands for us like a colossal monument visible from all the ends of the earth.
He is fearfully hard and coarse where another gentleman would exhibit kindliness and delicacy. Lately, when that slimy creature of his, that misplaced doctor, that dishonored Governor of Cuba, that sleight of hand
General, Leonard Wood, penned up six hundred helpless savages in a hole and butchered every one of them, allowing not even a woman or a child to escape, President Roosevelt—representative American gentleman, First American gentleman—put the heart and soul of our whole nation of gentlemen into the scream of delight which he cabled to Wood congratulating him on this...
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Roosevelt is far and away the worst President we have ever had, and also the most admired and the most satisfactory. The nation’s admiration of him and pride in him and worship of him is far wider, far warmer, and far more general than it has ever before la...
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These four men are prize-fighters—the most celebrated ones now living.
This autobiography of mine is a mirror, and I am looking at myself in it all the time. Incidentally I notice the people that pass along at my back—I get glimpses of them in the mirror—and whenever they say or do anything that can help advertise me and flatter me and raise me in my own estimation, I set these things down in my autobiography.
The most that I get out of the whole matter is that the Fuller life, like all other lives that climb up into old age or thereabouts, is a tragedy. It is a pity to grow old, because you know that the tragedy is always hanging over you, and if you don’t get out of life by some fortunate accident it will fall on you pretty surely.
They were living fashion-plates.
They were "influencers"
She had built up a great, a commercially valuable name, on absolute emptiness; built it up upon mere remarks about her clothes and where she was going to spend the summer, and her opinions about things that nobody had asked her to express herself about. It was the emptiest reputation that was ever invented in this world.
mephitic
After having been hard at work from nine or ten in the morning until eleven at night scraping material together, I took the pen and spread this muck out in words and phrases, and made it cover as much acreage as I could. It was fearful drudgery—soulless drudgery—and almost destitute of interest.
It was an awful slavery for a lazy man, and I was born lazy. I am no lazier now than I was forty years ago, but that is because I reached the limit forty years ago. You can’t go beyond possibility.
I was lofty in those days. I have survived it.
By my Presbyterian training, I knew that the Morning Call had brought disaster upon itself. I knew the ways of Providence, and I knew that this offence would have to be answered for. I could not foresee when the penalty would fall nor what shape it would take, but I was as certain that it would come, sooner or later, as I was of my own existence. I could not tell whether it would fall upon Barnes or upon his newspaper. But Barnes was the guilty one, and I knew, by my training, that the punishment always falls upon the innocent one, consequently I felt sure that it was the newspaper that at
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Sure enough! Among the very first pictures that arrived, in the fourth week of April—there stood the Morning Call building towering out of the wrecked city, like a Washington Monument; and the body of it was all gone, and nothing was left but the iron bones!
I knew that in Biblical times, if a man committed a sin, the extermination of the whole surrounding nation—cattle and all—was likely to happen. I knew that Providence was not particular about the rest, so that He got somebody connected with the one He was after.
meretricious,
This is the case among all the nations, both civilized and savage. It is a grotesquerie, but when the human race is not grotesque it is because it is asleep and losing its opportunity.
Also, during the same generation, each Christian Government has played with its neighbors a continuous poker game, in the naval line. In this game France puts up a battleship; England sees that battleship, and goes it one battleship better; Russia comes in and raises it a battleship or two—did, before the untaught stranger entered the game and reduced her stately pile of chips to a damaged ferry-boat and a cruiser that can’t cruise. We are in it, ourselves, now. This game goes on, and on, and on. There is never a new shuffle; never a new deal. No player ever calls another’s hand. It is merely
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put up; and by the law of probabilities, a day is coming when no Christians will be left on the land, except the women. The men will be all at sea, manning the fleets.
and even the Savior could come down and walk on the seas, foreigner as He is,
He proves, every day, that He takes no interest in man, nor in the other animals, further than to torture them, slay them, and get out of this pastime such entertainment as it may afford—and do what He can not to get weary of the eternal and changeless monotony of it.
gasometer.
When Mr. Rogers painstakingly tries for an easy shot and misses it a couple of yards and I burst into an unfeeling laugh, he does not resent it, he only leans on his cue and looks wounded, and says “I should be sorry to have a disposition like yours.”
I read the book every year, and in this way I go back to India without fatigue—the only foreign land I ever day-dream about or deeply long to see again.
To be successful, and worth printing, the imagined boy would have to tell his story himself, and let me act merely as his amanuensis. I did not tell the “Horse’s Tale,” the horse told it himself, through me. If he hadn’t done that it wouldn’t have been told at all.
“We are of the Anglo-Saxon race, and when the Anglo-Saxon wants a thing he just takes it.”
The soldier man’s great utterance, interpreted by the expression which he put into it, meant, in plain English— “The English and the Americans are thieves, highwaymen, pirates, and we are proud to be of the combination.”
Out of all the English and Americans present, there was not one with the grace to get up and say he was ashamed of being an Anglo-Saxon, and also ashamed of being a member of the human race, since the race must abide under the
presence upon it of the Anglo-Saxon taint. I could not perform this office. I could not afford to lose my temper and make a self-righteous exhibition of myself and my superior morals that I might teach this infant class in decency the rudiments of that cult, for they ...
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mephitic
It has always been a peculiarity of the human race that it keeps two sets of morals in stock—the private and real, and the public and artificial.
Tax
Steadily, continuously, persistently, we are Americanizing Europe, and all in good time we shall get the job perfected.
When a man reaches fifty, age seems to suddenly descend upon him like a black cloud. He feels immeasurably old—very much older than he is ever to feel again, I am sure. I doubt if any person ever crosses his fiftieth parallel without experiencing what I have just described. Once when I was visiting Howells in Cambridge, a long time ago, he glanced through the window and said,
spindrift,
casuistry
In my contacts with the species I find no one who possesses a quality which I do not possess. The shades of difference between other people and me serve to make variety and prevent monotony, but that is all; broadly speaking, we are all alike; and so by studying myself carefully and comparing myself with other people, and noting the divergences, I have been enabled to acquire a knowledge of the human race which I perceive is more accurate and more comprehensive than that which has been acquired and revealed by any other member of our species. As a result, my private and concealed opinion of
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a complimentary sort. It follows that my estimate of the human race is the duplicate of my estimate of myself.
These four men are prizefighters] M. C. Latta was chosen to be Roosevelt’s new assistant secretary. James J. Corbett (1866–1933) and James J. Jeffries (1875–1953) were former heavyweight champions; Robert P. Fitzsimmons (1862–1917) was a former middleweight, light-heavyweight, and heavyweight champion; Augustus Ruhlin (1872–1912) was a journeyman heavyweight, never a champion
From Sea to Sea (1899).
Isabel Lyon recorded that Clemens explained Kipling’s reactionary views as the result of “his training that makes him cling to his early beliefs; then he loves power & authority & Kingship”
Kipling’s short story collection Plain Tales from the Hills (1888); The Jungle Book and The Second Jungle Book (1894, 1895); and his novel Kim (1901).
Campbell-Bannerman
in 1905 King Edward VII appointed him premier (the first to be called prime minister)
The board soon issued an amplified list of three hundred recommended spellings. On 27 August, Roosevelt ordered the government printer to use the simplified system in all publications of the executive departments.
obloquy
orchestrelle
