Mark Twain

Martyrdom covers a multitude of sins.

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 a man.

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

A human being has a natural desire to have more of a good thing than he needs.

Name the greatest of all inventors. Accident.

Suppose you were an idiot, and suppose you were a member of congress; but I repeat myself.

The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things that lift human life above the level of farce and give it some of the grace of tragedy.

To hold a pen is to be at war.

Sir, I have found you an argument. I am not obliged to find you an understanding.

Life is tough, my darling, but so are you.

Kindness is in our power, even when fondness is not.

The truths of religion are never so well understood as by those who have lost the power of reason.

A mere literary man is a dull man; a man who is solely a man of business is a selfish man; but when literature and commerce are united, they make a respectable man.

Respect was invented to cover the empty place where love should be.

I have not become the Kings First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire.

Things derive their being and nature by mutual dependence and are nothing in themselves.

The trade of advertising is now so near perfection that it is not easy to propose any improvement. But as every art ought to be exercised in due subordination to the public good, I cannot but propose it as a moral question to these masters of the public ear, whether they do not sometimes play too wantonly with our passions.

Then spare the rod and spoil the child.

By his father he is English, by his mother he is Americanto my mind the blend which makes the perfect man.

Give us the tools, and we will finish the job.

But you must pay for conformity. All goes well as long as you run with conformists. But you, who are honest men in other particulars, know, that there is alive somewhere a man whose honesty reaches to this point also, that he shall not kneel to false gods, and, on the day when you meet him, you sink into the class of counterfeits.