Mark Twain Quotes
Man is without doubt the most interesting fool there is. He concedes that God made the angels immune from pain and death, and that he could have been similarly kind to man, but denies that he was under any moral obligation to do so.
Twain, Mark. Letters from the Earth. Harper & Row, 1962.
Without free will, it would be futile for priests, ministers, rabbis or imams to preach morality to try and get people to behave in certain ways. The concept if sin and morality breaks down, and the clerics lost most of their power and influence. Cave was very concerned with the fact that a number of scientists were arguing that human behavior is caused by neurobiology, genetics and conditioning. They question whether an individual can be held accountable for his actions by the society that raised him, educated him, influenced him, and if the individual seemed aberrant relative to all that, it must be because of his particular neurology which enables him or prevents him from being influenced by the society, or allows him to be influenced by the "darker" aspects of society.
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".
