The Gilded Age Quotes

“It is a time when one’s spirit is subdued and sad, one knows not why; when the past seems a storm-swept desolation, life a vanity and a burden, and the future but a way to death. It is a time when one is filled with vague longings; when one dreams of flight to peaceful islands in the remote solitudes of the sea, or folds his hands and says, What is the use of struggling, and toiling and worrying any more? let us give it all up.”
― Mark Twain, The Gilded Age

“A woman's intuition is better than a man's. Nobody knows anything, really, you know, and a woman can guess a good deal nearer than a man.”
― Mark Twain, The Gilded Age

“No country can be well governed unless its citizens as a body keep religiously before their minds that they are the guardians of the law, and that the law officers are only the machinery for its execution, nothing more.”
― Mark Twain, The Gilded Age

“Beautiful credit! The foundation of modern society. Who shall say that this is not the golden age of mutual trust, of unlimited reliance upon human promises? That is a peculiar condition of society which enables a whole nation to instantly recognize point and meaning in the familiar newspaper anecdote, which puts into the mouth of a distinguished speculator in lands and mines this remark: 'I wasn't worth a cent two years ago, and now I owe two millions of dollars.”
― Mark Twain, The Gilded Age

“If you should rear a duck in the heart of the Sahara, no doubt it would swim if you brought it to the Nile.”
― Mark Twain, The Gilded Age

“He spoke with only the slightest accent, one that had been inherited but not cultivated.”
― Mark Twain, The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today

“Congress is vindictive, Congress is savage, sir, when it gets waked up once. It will go to any length to vindicate its honor at such a time.”
― Mark Twain, The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today