Quotes from Mark Twain

It is my custom to keep on talking until I get the audience cowed

Who is this Renaissance? Where did he come from? Who gave him permission to cram the Republic with his execrable daubs?

The solution to our water problems is more rain.

Water, taken in moderation, cannot hurt anybody.

There are no people who are quite so vulgar as the over-refined.

Truth is mighty and will prevail. There is nothing the matter with this, except that it ain't so.

In religion and politics people's beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination, from authorities who have not themselves examined the questions at issue but have taken them at second-hand from other.

It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either.

He is useless on top of the ground; he ought to be under it, inspiring the cabbages.

Almost any man worthy of his salt would fight to defend his home, but no one ever heard of a man going to war for his boarding house

No God and no religion can survive ridicule. No political church, no nobility, no royalty or other fraud, can face ridicule in a fair field, and live.

Frankness is a jewel; only the young can afford it.

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

A good legible label is usually worth, for information, a ton of significant attitude and expression in a historical picture.

You perceive I generalize with intrepidity from single instances. It is the tourist's custom.

The man who is ostentatious of his modesty is twin to the statue that wears a fig-leaf.

If everybody was satisfied with himself there would be no heroes.

It is hopeless for the occasional visitor to try to keep up with Chicago-she outgrows his prophecies faster than he can make them. She is always a novelty; for she is never the Chicago you saw when you passed through the last time.

When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished by how much he'd learned in seven years.

Ignorance, intolerance, egotism, self-assertion, opaque perception, dense and pitiful chuckle headedness - and an almost pathetic unconsciousness of it all, that is what I was at nineteen and twenty.

When one's character begins to fall under suspicion and disfavor, how swift, then, is the work of disintegration and destruction.

Temperate temperance is best; intemperate temperance injures the cause of temperance.

A powerful agent is the right word. Whenever we come upon one of those intensely right words in a book or a newspaper the resulting effect is physical as well as spiritual, and electrically prompt.

Diligence is a good thing, but taking things easy is much more - restful.