Mark Twain Quotes
We build a fire in a powder magazine, then double the fire department to put it out. We inflame wild beasts with the smell of blood, and then innocently wonder at the wave of brutal appetite that sweeps the land as a consequence.
Newspapers and politicians of the time would sometimes whip up public opinion to a point of violence and then complain that people are violent.
Mark Twain, “Mark Twain Speaking,” Anti-Imperialist League Speech, October 17, 1907, pp. 592-593.
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Sherman, one of the most gifted generals of the Civil War. He hated the cruelty of war and the Civil War in particular as he had specifically warned his Southern friends ahead of time about what war would bring. See {585882}. Sherman was one of the first American military men to look at war without any of the romantic, patriotic, noble attributes that most others did.
He was warning the majority and blaming them for what was to happen. Ironically, at the end of the First World War, Germany was so harshly treated because the allies felt that the Germans had been aforewarned not only by others but by opposition Germans as well.
It is not known whether Agamemnon ever existed other than in Greek legends. The “quotation” comes to us from Homer’s Iliad which itself was based on oral histories before and itself was oral for years before it was written. So the dialogue may be written by Homer. However, if real, was the earliest reference to genocide. The photograph is of a mask believed to be of the period but there is no certainty is was the King even though was associated with him by Heinrich Schliemann—the 19th century archeologist who found the object.
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".
