Mark Twain Quotes
I bring you this stately matron named Christendom, returning bedraggled, besmirched, and dishonored from pirate raids in Kiao-Chow, Manchuria, South Africa, and the Phillipines, with her soul full of meanness, her pocket full of boodle, and her mouth full of pious hypocrisies. Give her soap and a towel, but hide the looking-glass.
Twain, Mark. To the Person Sitting in Darkness. North American Review, 1901.
What is fascinating about this quotation is that although the head of a religion, Smith was not advocating the kinds of personal lifestyles of his church the way modern religious leaders do, but was concerned with the much larger issues of expansionism, corruption of the courts and judiciary, and land distribution. He was a classic reform candidate in that sense. Smith had written to most of the then likely Presidential candidates of both major parties asking for their position on the Mormons who were facing persecution wherever they went. None of the politicians would make any satisfactory commitments. Smith took Direct Action and became the only major religious official to have run for the Presidency of the United States until Pat Robertson tried and failed in 2000. Smith’s assassination shortly thereafter cut his run for the Presidency short before it made much headway and politically he had no chance to affect the race.
This is only one of many anti-American and anti-Israeli and anti-Semitic passages in the text. It is typical of much of the Wahhabi literature which also supports jihad and violence. Much of the funding for the Wahabbi comes from the Saudi Arabian Government and members of the Saudi Royal Family. There is total censorship in Saudi Arabia and nothing gets preached or printed if the Saudi government wishes otherwise. However, most of the imams in Saudi Arabia are Wahhabi and are paid by the government. The Royal Family’s only fear of losing power is if the Islamic clerics claim that the government is not supportive of Islam. They spend much money to buy their lack of opposition to the monarchy. The government position however is contrary to these hate-filled textbooks.
This is a variation of the famous Lord Acton quotation: {292904}.
Previous Sultans had developed a large army of Black Moors. Then there was a civil war in Morocco where the light skinned Moroccans fought against those of dark skin. The light skins won and the new Sultan ordered the remnants of the Black soldiers with their families to Larache where he surrounded them by Arabs and simply gave the Blacks to the light skinned Arabs as slaves.
Perhaps the most famous quotation in all of Political Science is Lord Acton’s observation about power. See {292904}. What is fascinating is that 74 years earlier, Shelly, the most famous of the English Poets expressed the same idea in one of his great poems.
There are many who disagree with Say’s claim that the ancient system of colonization produced more friends then the system was at the beginning f the 19th century. Alexander the Great may have been the only large conqueror in world history where the conquered people thought they were better off than before. Certainly the Romans did not make friends, and the French Normans who conquered England were never considered “friends” by the Saxons.
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".
