Mark Twain Quotes
Citizenship should be placed above everything else, even learning.
Samuel Langhorne Clemens, 1835-1910
Mark Twain, Writer, Founder, Anti-Imperialist League, Speech, May 14,1908
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
This is another example of a common practice amongst dictators and extremists of the Right and the Left. First they define “Patriotic” as accepting and following their norms, politics, regulations or laws. Then they define out any dissidents as not bona fide citizens of the nation. In the next step, the lack of citizenship and patriotism allows imprisonment, torture and even death at times. It is one thing to accuse dissidents as being citizens in opposition to the existing government; it is quite another to define them as no longer a citizen who is entitled to the respect or rights of a citizen. This was typical of both Soviet Communism in the 1950s and the followers of Senator Joseph p. McCarthy in the United States.
See John F. Kennedy {589867} for a later expression of this concept. Also Khalil Gibran {601423} and Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. {603707}
In 1924 Congress Voted a bonus for all veterans of World War I. However, the President vetoed the bonus with this infamous statement. Congress overrode Coolidge’s veto, and the bonus became law but the administration did not pay it then. Subsequent Congresses did not appropriate the money to pay the bonuses, and that led to the tragedy of the government attack on the Bonus Army in the midst of the Great Depression in 1932. See Quotation 643961.
Samuel Langhorne Clemens, known by his pen name Mark Twain, was an American writer, humorist, entrepreneur, publisher, and lecturer. He was lauded as the "greatest humorist the United States has produced," and William Faulkner called him "the father of American literature". His novels include The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and its sequel, the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), the latter often called "The Great American Novel".
