Quotes from Mark Twain

I wanted to stop the whole thing and set the slaves free, but that would not do.  I must not interfere too much and get myself a name for riding over the country's laws and the citizen's rights roughshod.  If I lived and prospered I would be the death of slavery, that I was resolved upon; but I would try to fix it so that when I became its executioner it should be by command of the nation.

The community is eminently Portuguese—that is to say, it is slow, poor, shiftless, sleepy, and lazy.

People don't really read your books, they only say they do, to keep you from feeling bad.

B Y AND BY, WHEN WE GOT UP, WE TURNED OVER THE TRUCK THE GANG had stole off of the wreck, and found boots, and blankets, and clothes, and all sorts of other things, and a lot of books, and a spyglass, and three boxes of seegars.

All diets are wholesome. Some are wholesomer than others, but all the ordinary diets are wholesome enough for the people who use them. Whether the food be fine or coarse it will taste good and it will nourish if a watch be kept upon the appetite and a little starvation introduced every time it weakens.

Any established church is an established crime, an established slave pen.

People always more and more foolish, unless they take care to grow wiser and wiser

Like many other simple-hearted souls, it was her pet vanity to believe she was endowed with a talent for dark and mysterious diplomacy, and she loved to contemplate her most transparent devices as marvels of low cunning. Said

For I never care to do a thing in a quiet way; it's got to be theatrical or I don't take any interest in it.

We have the best government money can buy.

Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn't do than by the ones you did. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.

In our own case--we are not afraid of dynamite till we get acquainted with it.

Oh, anybody can run a tick down that don't belong to them. I'm satisfied with it. It's a good enough tick for me. Sho, there's

The Vesuvius of today is a very poor affair compared to the mighty volcano of Kilauea, in the Sandwich Islands, but I am glad I visited it. It was well worth it.

They forget to mention that he is the slowest mover in the universe; that his Eye that never sleeps, might as well, since it takes it a century to see what any other eye would see in a week; that in all history there is not an instance where he thought of a noble deed first, but always thought of it just a little after somebody else had thought of it and done it. He arrives then, and annexes the dividend.

I don't know. I don't want to sell him. All right. It's a mighty small tick, anyway.

We have reached a little altitude where we may look down upon the Indian Thugs with a complacent shudder; and we may even hope for a day, many centuries hence, when our posterity will look down upon us in the same way.

We were perfectly willing to go in there and rest, but it could not be done. It was only another delusion—a painting by some ingenious artist with little charity in his heart for tired folk.

It's an awful snug place for orgies. What orgies? I dono. But robbers always have orgies, and of course we've got to have them, too.

Greece is a bleak, unsmiling desert, without agriculture, manufactures or commerce, apparently. What supports its poverty-stricken people or its Government, is a mystery.

I felt very good; I judged I had done it pretty neat--I reckoned Tom Sawyer couldn't a done it no neater himself. Of course he would a throwed more style into it, but I can't do that very handy, not being brung up with it.

You say to yourself, 'How can a little girl be a grandmother.' It takes some little time to accept and realize the fact that while you have been growing old, your friends have not been standing still, in that matter.

There are people who think that honesty is always the best policy. This is a superstition; there are times when the appearance of it is worth six of it.

There are two times in a man's life when he should not speculate: when he can't afford it, and when he can.