MARK TWAIN

You can go into Mark Twain's material and prove anything you want. He was against war. He was for war. He was against rich people and he was for them. He was a kaleidoscope.

I bought a book of Mark Twain quotes. That's about my speed. I'll read a couple quotes and put it down.

Students don't know who Mark Twain was because he wasn't on the test.

Bob Hope, like Mark Twain, had a sense of humor that was uniquely American, and like Twain, we'll likely not see another like him.

My mum was never too keen on TV, so we kids all went to the library and got books out. Right from the start, I loved the works of Mark Twain. Every time I read about Tom Sawyer, I'd go out and do something low-level naughty, just like him.

I grew up reading Shakespeare and Mark Twain.

There are a lot of ways to practice the art of journalism, and one of them is to use your art like a hammer to destroy the right people — who are almost always your enemies, for one reason or another, and who usually deserve to be crippled, because they are wrong. This is a dangerous notion, and very few professional journalists will endorse it — calling it "vengeful" and "primitive" and "perverse" regardless of how often they might do the same thing themselves. "That kind of stuff is opinion," they say, "and the reader is cheated if it's not labelled as opinion." Well, maybe so. Maybe Tom Paine cheated his readers and Mark Twain was a devious fraud with no morals at all who used journalism for his own foul ends. And maybe H. L. Mencken should have been locked up for trying to pass off his opinions on gullible readers and normal "objective journalism." Mencken understood that politics — as used in journalism — was the art of controlling his environment, and he made no apologies for it. In my case, using what politely might be called "advocacy journalism," I've used reporting as a weapon to affect political situations that bear down on my environment.

Did Lincoln hate America when he voted against the Mexican War? Did Mark Twain hate America when he made speeches against the Spanish American War? If you love your country you will find ways to speak out …

You can't reason someone out of something that they weren't reasoned into in the first place.

I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.

Most men die at 27, we just bury them at 72.

Are you so unobservant as not to have found out that sanity and happiness are an impossible combination?

Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear - not absence of fear. So many look to eradicate fear from their lives, when that is an impossible task. You can certainly experience moments in absence of fear, however accept that fear will be with you whenever you are in the process of living creatively. The challenge is to go ahead regardless, simply notice the feeling and manage being courageous.

No amount of evidence will ever persuade an idiot

History doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes.

All that we require of a voter is that he shall be forked, wear pantaloons instead of petticoats, and bear a more or less humorous resemblance to the reported image of God. He need not know anything whatever; he may be wholly useless and a cumberer of the earth; he may even be known to be a consummate scoundrel. No matter. While he can steer clear of the penitentiary his vote is as weighty as the vote of a president, a bishop, a college professor, a merchant prince. We brag of our universal, unrestricted suffrage; but we are shams after all, for we restrict when we come to the women.

Fame is a vapor; popularity an accident; the only earthly certainty is oblivion.

You take the lies out of him, and he'll shrink to the size of your hat; you take the malice out of him, and he'll disappear.