Mark Twain

...majority Patriotism is the customary Patriotism.

The soul and substance of what customarily ranks as patriotism is moral cowardice -- and always has been.

Men and women -- even man and wife are foreigners. Each has reserves that the other cannot enter into, nor understand. These have the effect of frontiers.

If we learned to walk and talk the way we learn to read and write, everyone would limp and stutter.

For all the talk you hear about knowledge being such a wonderful thing, instinct is worth forty of it for real unerringness.

Laughter without a tinge of philosophy is but a sneeze of humor. Genuine humor is replete with wisdom.

Humor must be one of the chief attributes of God. Plants and animals that are distinctly humorous in form and characteristics are God's jokes.

Humor is the good natured side of a truth.

History never repeats itself; at best it sometimes rhymes.

I said there was but one solitary thing about the past worth remembering, and that was the fact that it is past-can't be restored.

It is the will of God that we must have critics and missionaries and congressmen and humorists, and we must bear the burden

Leaving out the gamblers, the burglars, and the plumbers, perhaps we do put our trust in God after a fashion. But, after all, it is an overstatement. If the cholera or black plague should come to these shores, perhaps the bulk of the nation would pray to be delivered from it, but the rest would put their trust in The Health Board.

Man proposes, but God blocks the game.

If God is what people say there can be no one in the universe so unhappy as He; for He sees unceasingly myriads of His creatures suffering unspeakable miseries--and besides this foresees how they are going to suffer during the remainder of their lives. One might as well say, "As unhappy as God."

Now I can only pray that there may be a God -- and a heaven -- or something better.

No man that has ever lived has done a thing to please God--primarily. It was done to please himself, then God next.

When one has tasted watermelon he knows what the angels eat.

You cannot have all chiefs; you gotta have Indians too._x000D_ _x000D_ Perfect love cannot be without equality._x000D_ _x000D_ A friend to everybody and to nobody is the same thing._x000D_ _x000D_ We are all alike, on the inside.

It is a solemn thought: dead, the noblest man's meat is inferior to pork.

Pity is for the living, envy is for the dead._x000D_ _x000D_ Death, the refuge, the solace, the best and kindliest and most prized friend and benefactor of the erring, the forsaken, the old and weary and broken of heart.

How lovely is death; and how niggardly it is doled out.