There isn’t anything so grotesque or so incredible that the average human being can’t believe it.


Mark Twain, as quoted in The Consciousness Deniers, Galen Strawson (NYRB, March 13, 2018)

Often, the surest way to convey misinformation is to tell the strict truth.

Mark Twain, Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World 

Don't part with your illusions. When they are gone you may still exist but you have ceased to live.

Mark Twain, Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World 

Wrinkles should merely indicate where smiles have been. 

Mark Twain, Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World 

All human rules are more or less idiotic, I suppose.  It is best so, no doubt.  The way it is now, the asylums can hold the sane people, but if we tried to shut up the insane we should run out of building materials.

Mark Twain, Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World

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 can not be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.

 Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad

When did ever self-righteousness know the sentiment of pity?

Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad

The coat-of-arms of the human race ought to consist of a man with an axe on his shoulder proceeding toward a grindstone.

We do no benevolences whose first benefit is not for ourselves.

Mark Twain, Reflections on a Letter and a Book, The Autobiography of Mark Twain.

Paige and I always meet on effusively affectionate terms; and yet he knows perfectly well that if I had his nuts in a steel-trap I would shut out all human succor and watch that trap till he died.

Mark Twain, Autobiography of Mark Twain.