Quotes by Mark Twain

About Mark Twain:

Samuel Langhorne Clemens was an American author and humorist. He wrote The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and its sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), the latter often called "The Great American Novel".
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

To be a patriot, one had to say, and keep on saying, "Our Country, right or wrong," and urge on the little war. Have you not perceived that that phrase is an insult to the nation?

Mark Twain

Peace by persuasion has a pleasant sound, but I think we should not be able to work it. We should have to tame the human race first, and history seems to show that that cannot be done.

Mark Twain

Perfect grammar--persistent, continuous, sustained--is the fourth dimension, so to speak: many have sought it, but none has found it.

Mark Twain

Distance lends enchantment to the view.

Mark Twain

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 a...

Mark Twain

But the elastic heart of youth cannot be compressed into one constrained shape long at a time.

Mark Twain

There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.

Mark Twain

There is no distinctly native American criminal class save Congress.

Mark Twain

If we would learn what the human race really is at bottom, we need only observe it in election times.

Mark Twain

Thanksgiving Day, a function which originated in New England two or three centuries ago when those people recognized that they really had something to be thankful for -- annually, not oftener -- if they had succeeded in exterminating their neighbors,...

Mark Twain

Conservatism is the blind and fear-filled worship of dead radicals.

Mark Twain

In the beginning of a change the patriot is a scarce man, and brave, and hated and scorned. When his cause succeeds, the timid join him, for then it costs nothing to be a patriot.

Mark Twain

Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason.

Mark Twain

In light matters--matters of small consequence, like religion and politics and such things--he never acquired a conviction that could survive a disapproving remark from a cat.

Mark Twain

It may have happened, it may not have happened but it could have happened.

Mark Twain

Don't use a five-dollar word when a fifty-cent word will do.

Mark Twain

Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear-not absence of fear. Except a creature be part coward it is not a compliment to say it is brave; it is merely a loose misapplication of the word. Consider the flea!-Incomparably the bravest of all the cr...

Mark Twain

There is one notable thing about our Christianity: bad, bloody, merciless, money-grabbing and predatory as it is -- in our country particularly, and in all other Christian countries in a somewhat modified degree -- it is still a hundred times better ...

Mark Twain

Habit is habit, and not to be flung out of the window by any man, but coaxed down-stairs one step at a time.

Mark Twain

We don not think, in the holy places; we think in bed, afterwards, when the glare, and the the noise, and the confusion are gone, and in fancy we revisit alone, the solemn monuments of the past, and summon the phantom pageants of an age that has pass...

Mark Twain

Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it's time to pause and reflect

Mark Twain

Author Bio

  • NameMark Twain
  • DescriptionAmerican author and humorist
  • AliasesSamuel Langhorne Clemens; Samuel Clemens
  • BornNovember 30, 1835
  • DiedApril 21, 1910
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionJournalist; Humorist; Novelist; Children's Writer; Autobiographer
  • WorksAdventures Of Huckleberry Finn; The Adventures Of Tom Sawyer