Mark Twain Quotes

We need not worry so much about what man descends from - it's what he descends to that shames the human race.

People think that human beings have gotten worse, that because of the pressures that modern society puts on us, we've gotten worse, and we've gotten capable of doing more terrible things. I don't know if I necessarily think that that's true.

Life is no longer a contest of great minds for great ends, but a pot house squabble.

We are all sculptors and painters, and our material is our own flesh and blood and bones. Any nobleness begins at once to refine a man's features, any meanness or sensuality to imbrute them.

We're supposed to be becoming more evolved as a society, and we're actually becoming less evolved.

The descent to hell is easy and those who begin by worshipping power, soon worship evil.

We approach a condition in which we shall be amoral without the capacity to perceive it and degraded without the means to measure our descent.

People used to blush when they were ashamed. Now they are ashamed if they blush. Modesty has disappeared and a brazen generation with no fear of God before its eyes mocks at sin. We are so fond of being called tolerant and broadminded that we wink at sin when we ought to weep.

The decay of decency in the modern age, the rebellion against law and good faith, the treatment of human beings as things, as the mere instruments of power and ambition, is without a doubt the consequence of the decay of the belief in man as something more than an animal animated by highly conditioned reflexes and chemical reactions. For, unless man is something more than that, he has no rights that anyone is bound to respect, and there are no limitations upon his conduct which he is bound to obey.

It would be a piece of ingenuousness to accuse the man of today of his lack of moral code. The accusation would leave him cold, or rather, would flatter him. Immoralism has become a commonplace, and anybody and everybody boasts of practising it.

Wherever we direct our view, we discover the melancholy proofs of our depravity; whether we look to ancient or modern times, to barbarous or civilized nations, to the conduct of the world around us, or to the monitor within the breast; whether we read, or hear, or act, or think, or feel, the same humiliating lesson is forced upon us.

[Whenever] you get near the human race, there's layers and layers of nonsense.

Authority has always attracted the lowest elements in the human race

Or maybe you’re merely uncomfortable with uncertainty. Like the rest of the human race.

Man grows used to everything, the scoundrel!

I think that - apart from the fields of science and medicine - we live in an age of decline. Look at the world. There is decline in morals, ideals, manners, respect, truthfulness: just about everything, in fact.

Success does not implant bad characteristics in people. It merely steps up the growth rate of the bad characteristics they already had.

Consequently, theories of evolution which, in accordance with the philosophies inspiring them, consider the mind as emerging from the forces of living matter, or as a mere epiphenomenon of this matter, are incompatible with the truth about man. Nor are they able to ground the dignity of the person.

It is not depravity that afflicts the human race so much as a general lack of intelligence.

The human race is almost addicted to war. It's like we just can't stop.

A society composed of none but the wicked could not exist; it contains within itself the seeds of its own destruction, and without a flood, would be swept away from the earth by the deluge of its own iniquity.

However it may be confounded or covered up or counterfeited, this elemental capacity to fight against injustice remains the distinguishing characteristic of human beings.

To be now a sensible man, by and by a fool, and presently a beast!

We're in a decaying culture now. Naturally, the young people in the culture are going to feel themselves to be products of the decay.

Were the life of man prolonged, he would become such a proficient in villainy, that it would become necessary again to drown or to burn the world. Earth would become an hell; for future rewards when put off to a great distance, would cease to encourage, and future punishments to alarm.