Mark Twain Quotes

Your security is not in the hands of Kerry, Bush or al-Qaida. Your security is in your own hands.

I was very unique as a child, dressed a certain way, acted a certain way, didn't fit in with everybody. So I immediately got picked on, especially around the age of 12 and 13, when you start going to junior high and start mingling with the older kids. To counteract that, strictly for self-defense, I wanted to get bigger.

It emasculated people to be protected in this way... [They should] be used to protecting themselves.

Nobody else is going to protect yourself. You've got to protect yourself.

Our obligation is to ourselves and obligating to ourselves the job of defending and protecting America is how we serve other people around the world, not by letting this country go to hell. We are under no such obligation.

A person's life is a journey, a road. Sometimes you go off the road and sometimes you stay on all the way through. But you are the only one on that road. It's your road.

In ourselves our safety must be sought. By our own right hand it must be wrought.

Nobody can build the bridge for you to walk across the river of life, no one but you yourself alone. There are, to be sure, countless paths and bridges and demi-gods which would carry you across this river; but only at the cost of yourself; you would pawn yourself and lose. There is in the world only one way, on which nobody can go, except you: where does it lead? Do not ask, go along with it.

We have to take care of our own game. There's only one place we've got to stick up for ourselves and that's the pitch.

The human instinct for self-preservation is strong. I know, because mine pulls at me, too, like the needle on a compass. And everybody - I've been reading some philosophy - everybody seems to agree that the instinct and responsibility of all humans is to take care of themselves first. You have the right to self-defense. You have the right to survive, if you can.

The Almighty gave us our lives, and I suppose He meant us to defend them, at least I have always acted on that, and I hope it will not be brought up against me when my clock strikes.

I cannot be other than what I am, and I am the choices of all my days.

No man or woman can live another's fate

Luckily, I's learned at an early age that self-preservation was the only way to survive with your soul intact.

I have achieved my seventy years in the usual way: by sticking strictly to a scheme of life which would kill anybody else... I will offer here, as a sound maxim, this: That we can't reach old age by another man's road.

Blaming the wolf would not help the sheep much. The sheep must learn not to fall in the clutches of the wolf.

Most people...are like a falling leaf that drifts and turns in the air, flutters, and falls to the ground. But a few others are like stars which travel one defined path: no wind reaches them, they have within themselves their guide and path.

Be your own place of safety, she told herself, straightening. No crossbar in the world could protect her from what lay ahead, and neither could a tiny knife ticked in her boot - though there her tiny knife would most certainly remain - and neither could a man, not even Akiva. She had to be her own strength, complete unto herself.

If there were already a path, it would have to be someone else's; the whole point is to find your own way.

It's only intelligent to wish to look after yourself properly.

However much you love somebody, you should always keep a part of yourself to yourself. Never give it all. You can never be yourself otherwise.

How frightened hypocrisy hastens to defend itself.

Maybe what I do isn't going to be acknowledged by people, but that's me. It's my nature to do things that are weirder and less understood and that was a path I needed to take

In the end, as you get older and older, your life is your life, and you are alone with it.

...never try to follow another's path for that is his way, not yours. When that path is found, you have nothing to do but fold your arms and the tide will carry you to freedom.