Mark Twain Quotes

“In these final months, Twain had grown to adore Grant and regarded their relationship as one of the highlights of his life. He felt tenderness and awe as he watched Grant dying with such dignity. On July 1, Twain wrote to Livy that “the General is as placid, serene, & self-possessed as ever, & his eye has the same old humorous twinkle in it, & his frequent smile is still the smile of pleasantness & peace. Manifestly, dying is nothing to a really great & brave man.”
― Ron Chernow, Mark Twain

“He came to see Mugwumps as the supreme prophets and change-makers in history: “Washington, Garrison, Galileo, Luther, Christ. Loyalty to petrified opinions never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul in this world—and never will,” he told the Monday Evening Club.[10] More and more he found party orthodoxy a frightening force that made people blindly follow ideas, however wrongheaded. “If you could work the multiplication table into a democratic platform the republicans w[oul]d vote it down at the election,” he wrote.[11] While most people fancied that they originated their political ideas, Twain argued that they were usually shopworn relics, borrowed from stale party organs. “Men think they think upon great political questions, and they”
― Ron Chernow, Mark Twain

“I don’t know anything about this man [Twain]. At least I know only two things; one is, he hasn’t been in the penitentiary, and the other is…I don’t know why.”[46]”
― Ron Chernow, Mark Twain

“When she was in her eighties, her son asked about his troubled infancy. 'I suppose that during all that time you were uneasy about me.' 'Yes, the whole time,' she agreed. Twain persisted: 'Afraid I wouldn't live?' With a perfect deadpan worthy of her son, Jane retorted, 'No, afraid you would.”
― Ron Chernow, Mark Twain

“Liberal Republican wing of the party”
― Ron Chernow, Mark Twain

“After hearing a shipboard sermon, a dose of the old-time religion, he trained his critical faculties on Christianity and mocked the notion of Christ sacrificing His life for humanity. “If Christ was God, then the crucifixion is without dignity. It is merely ridiculous, for to endure several hours’ pain is nothing heroic in God, in any case.”[106] He pointed out that “every girl takes a risk superior to that when she marries & subjects herself to the probable pains of childbirth indefinitely repeated.”[107]”
― Ron Chernow, Mark Twain

“Poor Swift—under the placid surface of this simply-worded book flows the full tide of his venom—the turbid sea of his matchless hate.”
― Ron Chernow, Mark Twain

“Talking of patriotism, what humbug it is; it is a word that always commemorates a robbery,” he wrote in 1896. “Patriotism is being carried to insane excess. I know men who do not love God because he is a foreigner.”[”
― Ron Chernow, Mark Twain

“Since Livy had warned her that she must never marry, she felt condemned to an insufferably loveless life. “Am I never to know what love means because I am an epileptic and shouldn’t marry if I had the chance?” she wrote in her diary on the Prinz Oskar.”
― Ron Chernow, Mark Twain

“He understood the secret of modern celebrity—that “conspicuousness is the only thing necessary in a person to command our interest and, in a larger or smaller sense, our worship.”[9]”
― Ron Chernow, Mark Twain

“There are many humorous things in the world; among them the white man’s notion that he is less savage than the other savages.”[9”
― Ron Chernow, Mark Twain

“Loyalty to petrified opinions never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul in this world—and never will,” he told the Monday Evening Club.”
― Ron Chernow, Mark Twain

“I filled the Government offices all over this whole land with the vilest scum that could be scraped from the political gutters & the ranks of the Union haters.”
― Ron Chernow, Mark Twain

“That the compassionate Jane Clemens could be trained to regard slavery as a humane system instead of a monstrosity would serve as an object lesson for Mark Twain in the terrifying power of environment to shape and distort human behavior.”
― Ron Chernow, Mark Twain

“Isn’t man a creature to be ashamed of in pretty much all his aspects? Is he really fit for anything but to be stood up on the street corner as a convenience for dogs?”[5]”
― Ron Chernow, Mark Twain

“Questioning what constituted true patriotism, he grew enraged by the expression “Our country, right or wrong!” In his notebook, he commented: “We have thrown away the most valuable asset we had:—the individual’s right to oppose both flag & country when he…believed them to be in the wrong. We have thrown it away; & with it, all that was really respectable about that grotesque and laughable word, Patriotism.”[26] In an unpublished essay, “As Regards Patriotism,” he discussed the culture’s frightening power to brainwash or bully people into their political beliefs and “debase angels to men and lift men to angelship. And it can do any one of these miracles in a year—even in six months.”[27]”
― Ron Chernow, Mark Twain

“For all his cynicism, Twain found in Grant an irreproachable character, a man of exemplary simplicity, kindness, and modesty. A decade later he called him “the greatest man I have ever had the privilege of knowing personally. And I have not known a man with a kinder nature or a purer character.”
― Ron Chernow, Mark Twain

“O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with their little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst.”[40] The congregation sits speechless, startled by this sudden, unwelcome outburst, and Twain concludes: “It was believed afterward that the man was a lunatic, because there was no sense in what he said.”[41] Compact in expression, hard-hitting”
― Ron Chernow, Mark Twain

“As he contemplated Oahu from afar, he reflected, “If I might I would go ashore and never leave.”
― Ron Chernow, Mark Twain

“Twain eagerly anticipated his brief stopover and lecture in the Sandwich Islands, a place that had never relaxed its romantic hold over his imagination.”
― Ron Chernow, Mark Twain

“charm for me. I have seen all the foreign countries I want to see except heaven and hell, & I have only a vague curiosity as concerns one of those.”[57] The change in continents”
― Ron Chernow, Mark Twain

“Men think they think upon great political questions, and they do; but they think with their party, not independently.”[12]”
― Ron Chernow, Mark Twain

“More and more he found party orthodoxy a frightening force that made people blindly follow ideas, however wrongheaded. “If you could work the multiplication table into a democratic platform the republicans w[oul]d vote it down at the election,” he wrote.[11]”
― Ron Chernow, Mark Twain

“Andrew Johnson, whose coddling of southern white planters ran counter to the Radical Republicans’ desire to empower emancipated Blacks in the South. Johnson had handed out wholesale pardons to former Confederates; obstructed Reconstruction legislation; gutted the Freedmen’s Bureau designed to assist the once-enslaved; and allowed the Ku Klux Klan to murder Blacks in the South with impunity. Twain was slow to support Reconstruction. “The truth is,” he wrote in January 1868, “that the more Congress reconstructs, the more the South goes to pieces.”[”
― Ron Chernow, Mark Twain

“He cynically believed that most Americans only pretended to like opera, whereas the German affection seemed genuine, if mystifying. When he attended a sold-out performance of Lohengrin, he allowed that he enjoyed the bridal song and some choruses, but that was as far as he would go. “The banging and slamming and booming and crashing were something beyond belief. The racking and pitiless pain of it remains stored up in my memory alongside the memory of the time that I had my teeth fixed.”[59] He had gone to operas for fourteen years and enjoyed arias from Il Trovatore and other familiar works. By contrast, the “intense but incoherent noise” of Lohengrin reminded him “of the time the orphan asylum burned down.”[60] Leaving the opera house with a headache, he had many future scores to settle with Richard Wagner.”
― Ron Chernow, Mark Twain

“Letter to John Russell Young, March 8–10, 1869. March 1869. Editorial note. “The White House Funeral.”
― Ron Chernow, Mark Twain

“If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and a man.”[”
― Ron Chernow, Mark Twain

“Twenty-five years later, Twain could still tell a Sandwich Islands resident that his family had heard him “sigh for the Islands every year for twenty years, yet have never heard me sigh to return to any other place I had seen before.”[31]”
― Ron Chernow, Mark Twain

“Villa Viviani, set on a hillside near the village of Settignano, northeast of Florence. The house had two stories, two”
― Ron Chernow, Mark Twain

“Twain was perplexed by friends who supported Blaine, especially Howells. “Somehow I can’t seem to rest quiet under the idea of your voting for Blaine,” he told him. “I believe you said something about the country & the party. Certainly allegiance to these is well; but as certainly a man’s first duty is to his own conscience & honor—the party & the country come second to that, & never first.”[”
― Ron Chernow, Mark Twain