I am only human, although I regret it.

I’ve never wished a man dead, but I have read some obituaries with great pleasure.

It is by the goodness of god that in our country we have those 3 unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either of them.

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

The rule is perfect: in all matters of opinion our adversaries are insane.

Of course truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense.

If I were to construct a God I would furnish Him with some way and qualities and characteristics which the Present lacks.

It is curious that physical courage should be so common in the world and moral courage so rare.

New Orleans food is as delicious as the less criminal forms of sin.

Honesty: The best of all the lost arts.

Tom’s whole being applauded this idea. It was deep, and dark, and awful; the hour, the circumstances, the surroundings, were in keeping with it.

All right, then, I’ll go to hell.

The trouble is not in dying for a friend, but in finding a friend worth dying for.

It’s spring fever. That is what the name of it is. And when you’ve got it, you want—oh, you don’t quite know what it is you do want, but it just fairly makes your heart...

Climate is what we expect, weather is what we get.

I did not attend his funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it.

A big leather-bound volume makes an ideal razorstrap. A thing book is useful to stick under a table with a broken caster to steady it. A large, flat atlas can be used to cover a...

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

Don’t say the old lady screamed. Bring her on and let her scream.

Loyalty to country ALWAYS. Loyalty to government, when it deserves it.

If we hadn’t our bewitching autumn foliage, we should still have to credit the weather with one feature which compensates for all its bullying vagaries-the ice storm: when a leafless tree is clothed with ice...

The poorest paid architect, engineer, general, author, sculptor, painter, lecturer, advocate, legislator, actor, preacher, singer is constructively in heaven when he is at work; and as for the musician with the fiddle-bow in his hand...

A dog is der Hund the dog; a women is die Frau the wom[an]; a horse is das Pferd, the horse; now you put that dog in the Genitive case, & is he the same...

Wherever he found his speech growing too modern — which was about every sentence or two — he ladled in a few such Scriptural phrases as “exceeding sore,” “and it came to pass,” etc., and...

Well, there was a sort of bastard justice in his view of the case, and so I dropped the matter. When you can’t cure a disaster by argument, what is the use to argue?

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...

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.

I believe that the trade of critic, in literature, music, and the drama, is the mot degraded of all trades, and that it has no real value–certainly no large value.

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...

I must have a prodigious amount of mind; it takes me as much as a week, sometimes, to make it up!

Now and then we had a hope that if we lived and were good, God would permit us to be pirates.

A proof once established is better left so.

When I am king they shall not have bread and shelter only, but also teachings out of books, for a full belly is little worth where the mind is starved.

Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.BY ORDER...

The Whites always mean well when they take human fish out of the ocean and try to make them dry and warm and happy and comfortable in a chicken coop; but the kindest-hearted white man...

Memories which someday will become all beautiful when the last annoyance that encumbers them shall have faded out of our minds.

Right is right, and wrong is wrong, and a body ain’t got no business doing wrong when he ain’t ignorant and knows better.

I have been an author for 20 years and an ass for 55.

The highest perfection of politeness is only a beautiful edifice, built, from the base to the dome, of graceful and gilded forms of charitable and unselfish lying.

How empty is theory in the presence of fact!

Let us consider that we are all partially insane. It will explain us to each other; it will unriddle many riddles; it will make clear and simple many things which are involved in haunting and...

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

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

Most writers regard the truth as their most valuable possession, and therefore are economical in its use.

God created war so that Americans would learn geography.

History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.

High and fine literature is wine, and mine is only water; but everybody likes water.

A mighty porterhouse steak an inch and a half thick, hot and sputtering from the griddle; dusted with fragrant pepper; enriched with little melting bits of butter of the most impeachable freshness and genuineness; the...

The best of all lost arts is honesty

Tom Sawyer the Pirate looked around upon the envying juveniles about him and confessed in his heart that this was the proudest moment of his life.