Mark Twain Quotes

What an ugly beast the ape, and how like us.

I used to look down on the world for being corrupt, but now I adore it for the utter magnificence of that corruption.

None of us is guaranteed against failure or corruption of any kind; witness what's going on in the world in this moment, the follies of human nature and the failures of human nature.

For there is nothing so social by nature, [and] so unsocial by its corruption, as this race.

Hypocrisy is a fearful evil, and every thing which has a tendency to produce it should be avoided.

Politics has become beyond acceptable when it comes to humanity. People are just frozen in falsehood.

To animalise is humane, to humanise is animal.

I remember when I was a child, being taken to the celebrated Barnum's Circus, which contained an exhibition of freaks and monstrosities, but the exhibit on the program which I most desired to see was the one described as ‘The Boneless Wonder’. My parents judged that the spectacle would be too demoralizing and revolting for my youthful eye and I have waited fifty years, to see The Boneless Wonder sitting on the Treasury Bench.

It's the lack of humanity in the human psyche that haunts me. The hypocrisy. How people as a group can take something like tolerance and contort it into a new form of intolerance and conformity. The way humanity can justify any kind of evil.

Sometimes I think that Darwin made a mistake and that in fact man is descended from the pig, because eight out of every ten members of the human race are swine, and as crooked as a hog's tail.

The typical lawmaker of today is a man wholly devoid of principle - a mere counter in a grotesque and knavish game. If the right pressure could be applied to him, he would be cheerfully in favor of polygamy, astrology or cannibalism.

Most birds are geniuses. We had one that became a pet; he learned to talk, use tools and solve problems.

Chimps are far too much human to be my favorite animal.

In the distance, the gestures of animals look human, the gestures of human beings bestial.

Sharp is the kiss of the falcon's beak.

Man loves his own ruin. The cup is so sweet that though he knows it will poison him, yet he must drink it. And the harlot is so fair, that though he understands that her ways lead down to hell, yet like a bullock he follows to the slaughter till the dart goes through his liver. Man is fascinated and bewitched by sin.

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.

Vices of the time; vices of the man.

Socialism is humanity's second nature. All politicians do is turn human vice into votes.

I think we must fully face the fact that when Christianity does not make a man very much better, it makes him very much worse... Conversion may make of one who was, if no better, no worse than an animal, something like a devil.

This is a fallen world. People lie, the truth gets distorted, and that's the way it is. What's for dinner ?

Generally, or at least very often, people with a deep interest in animals are the best people around.

Moral self-infatuation has its own corruptions, after all. With time, almost every other principle of the magazine acquired an ironic echo, a sort of cackling aftermath.

Animals are nicer than humans and they're conscious beings. If you stick your grandmother in an oven, she will probably be tasty. But is that any reason to eat your grandmother?