Celebrate Mark Twain Day

His birthday is Nov. 30, so about then plus or minus a day or two would be an appropriate time to celebrate the contributions of Mark Twain to culture as we know it. This includes his literature and humor of course, but also his talent for critical thinking and skepticism. He can still tickle our funny bone, but can also help clear our minds of cognitive dust.

 

Mark Twain Quotes

A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.

A man is accepted into a church for what he believes and he is turned out for what he knows.

A man is never more truthful than when he acknowledges himself a liar.

A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way.

A man with a new idea is a crank until he succeeds.

A person who won't read has no advantage over one who can't read.

Age is an issue of mind over matter. If you don't mind, it doesn't matter.

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.

Anger is an acid that can do more harm to the vessel in which it is stored than to anything on which it is poured.

Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint.

Better to keep your mouth shut and appear stupid than to open it and remove all doubt.

Concentration of power in a political machine is bad; and an Established Church is only a political machine; it was invented for that; it is nursed, cradled, preserved for that; it is an enemy to human liberty, and does no good which it could not better do in a split-up and scattered condition.

Conformity -- the natural instinct to passively yield to that vague something recognized as authority.

Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear, not absence of fear.

Don't go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first.

Education: that which reveals to the wise, and conceals from the stupid, the vast limits of their knowledge.

Familiarity breeds contempt -- and children.

Forgiveness is the fragrance that the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it.

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

Giving up smoking is the easiest thing in the world. I know because I've done it thousands of times.

Go to Heaven for the climate. Hell for the company.

God created war so that Americans would learn geography.

Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.

I cannot see how a man of any large degree of humorous perception can ever be religious -- unless he purposely shut the eyes of his mind & keep them shut by force.

I have been scientifically studying the traits and dispositions of the “lower animals” (so-called,) and contrasting them with the traits and dispositions of man. I find the result profoundly humiliating to me. For it obliges me to renounce my allegiance to the Darwinian theory of the Ascent of Man from the Lower Animals; since it now seems plain to me that that theory ought to be vacated in favor of a new and truer one, this new and truer one to be named the Descent of Man from the Higher Animals.

I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.

I was dead for millions of years before I was born and it never inconvenienced me a bit. Manifestly, dying is nothing to a really great and brave man.

I was gratified to be able to answer promptly, and I did. I said I didn’t know.

If Christ were here there is one thing he would not be -- a Christian.

If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and man.

If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything.

In the first place, God made idiots. That was for practice. Then he made school boards.

It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native American criminal class, except Congress.

It is better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to open one's mouth and remove all doubt.

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.

It [the Bible] is full of interest. It has noble poetry in it; and some clever fables; and some blood-drenched history; and some good morals; and a wealth of obscenity; and upwards of a thousand lies.

Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see.

Loyalty to a petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul.

Man is a Religious Animal. He is the only Religious Animal. He is the only animal that has the True Religion-- several of them. He is the only animal that loves his neighbor as himself and cuts his throat if his theology isn't straight.

Man is the only animal that blushes. Or needs to.

Most people are bothered by those passages of Scripture they do not understand, but the passages that bother me are those I do understand.

Never put off until tomorrow what you can do the day after tomorrow.

Nothing agrees with me. If I drink coffee, it gives me dyspepsia; if I drink wine, it gives me the gout; if I go to church, it gives me dysentery.

Often the less there is to justify a traditional custom the harder it is to get rid it.

One of the proofs of the immortality of the soul is that myriads have believed in it. They have also believed the world was flat.

Only one thing is impossible for God: To find any sense in any copyright law on the planet.

Patriotism is supporting your country all the time, and your government when it deserves it.

Sacred cows make the best hamburger.

The altar cloth of one aeon is the doormat of the next.

The best minds will tell you that when a man has begotten a child he is morally bound to tenderly care for it, protect it from hurt, shield it from disease, clothe it, feed it, bear with its waywardness, lay no hand upon it save in kindness and for its own good, and never in any case inflict upon it a wanton cruelty. God's treatment of his earthly children, every day and every night, is the exact opposite of all that, yet those best minds warmly justify these crimes, condone them, excuse them, and indignantly refuse to regard them as crimes at all, when he commits them. Your country and mine is an interesting one, but there is nothing there that is half so interesting as the human mind.

The church is always trying to get other people to reform; it might not be a bad idea to reform itself a little, by way of example.

The citizen who thinks he sees that the commonwealth's political clothes are worn out, and yet holds his peace and does not agitate for a new suit, is disloyal; he is a traitor.

The difference between the right word and almost the right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug.

The easy confidence with which I know another man's religion is folly teaches me to suspect that my own is also.

The gods offer no rewards for intellect. There was never one yet that showed any interest in it.

The motto stated a lie. If this nation has ever trusted in God, that time has gone by; for nearly half a century almost its entire trust has been in the Republican party and the dollar -- mainly the dollar. I recognize that I am only making an assertion and furnishing no proof; I am sorry, but this is a habit of mine; sorry also that I am not alone in it; everybody seems to have this disease.

The radical invents the views. When he has worn them out the conservative adopts them.

The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.

The so-called Christian nations are the most enlightened and progressive ... but in spite of their religion, not because of it. The Church has opposed every innovation and discovery from the day of Galileo down to our own time, when the use of anesthetic in childbirth was regarded as a sin because it avoided the biblical curse pronounced against Eve. And every step in astronomy and geology ever taken has been opposed by bigotry and superstition. The Greeks surpassed us in artistic culture and in architecture five hundred years before Christian religion was born.

There are lies, damned lies and statistics.

There are those who scoff at the school boy, calling him frivolous and shallow. Yet it was the schoolboy who said, "Faith is believing what you know ain't so."

To this day I cherish an unappeasable bitterness against the unfaithful guardians of my young life, who not only permitted but compelled me to read an unexpurgated Bible through before I was 15 years old. None can do that and ever draw a clean sweet breath again this side of the grave....

Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.

Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn't.

We have the best government in the world... that money can buy.

What is there that confers the noblest delight? What is that which swells a man's breast with pride above that which any other experience can bring to him? Discovery! To know that you are walking where none others have walked...

What, sir, would the people of the earth be without woman? They would be scarce, sir, almighty scarce.

When even the brightest mind in our world has been trained up from childhood in a superstition of any kind, it will never be possible for that mind, in its maturity, to examine sincerely, dispassionately, and conscientiously any evidence or any circumstance which shall seem to cast a doubt upon the validity of that superstition. I doubt if I could do it myself.

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 at how much the old man had learned in seven years.

When the human race has once acquired a superstition, nothing short of death is ever likely to remove it.

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

You believe in a book that has talking animals, wizards, witches, demons, sticks turning into snakes, burning bushes, food falling from the sky, people walking on water, and all sorts of magical, absurd and primitive stories, and you say that we are the ones that need help?

You cannot depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.