Quotes from Mark Twain

All schools, all colleges have two great functions to confer, and to conceal valuable knowledge. - Notebook, 1908

All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence -- and then success is sure.

Always do right. This will gratify some people and astonish the rest.

An Englishman is a person who does things because they have been done before. An American is a person who does things because they haven't been done before.

At the beginning of a great national change, the patriot is a scarce man: scorned, ridiculed and forgotten. When his cause succeeds, however, all men will join him, for then it costs nothing to be a patriot.

Behold, the fool saith, Put not all thine eggs in the one basket, -- which is but a manner of saying, Scatter your money and your attention, but the wise man saith, Put all your eggs in the one basket and -- watch that basket.

Carlyle said, "A lie cannot live"; it shows he did not know how to tell them.

Censorship is telling a man he can't have a steak just because a baby can't chew it.

Cold! If the thermometer had been an inch longer we'd all have frozen to death.

Describing her first day back in grade school after a long absence, a teacher said, It was like trying to hold 35 corks under water at the same time.

Each man must for himself alone decide what is right and what is wrong, which course is patriotic and which isn't. You cannot shirk this and be a man. To decide against your conviction is to be an unqualified and excusable traitor, both to yourself and to your country, let me label you as they may.

Everything has its limit--iron ore cannot be educated into gold. - 1906

Facts are stubborn, but statistics are more pliable.

Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn't.

Fleas can be taught nearly anything a congressman can.

Forgiveness is the fragrance that the violet sheds upon the heel that crushes it.

George Washington as a boy was ignorant of the commonest accomplishments of youth - he could not even lie.

Get your facts first and then you can distort them as much as you wish.

Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please. (Facts are stubborn, but statistics are more pliable.)

Go and surprise the whole country by doing something right.

God made the Idiot for practice, and then He made the School Board

He had discovered a great law of human action, without knowing it - namely, that in order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to obtain.

He would come in and say he changed his mind -- which was a gilded figure of speech, because he didn't have any.

Heaven goes by favour. If it went by merit, you would stay out and your dog would go in.