"I am only human, although I regret it."

"A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes."

"I've never wished a man dead, but I have read some obituaries with great pleasure."

"Never have a battle of wits with an unarmed person."

"In the beginning of a change the patriot is a scarce man, and brave, and hated and scorned. When his cause succeeds, the timid join him, for then it costs nothing to be a patriot."

"Distance lends enchantment to the view."

"Write without pay until somebody offers to pay."

"Loyalty to the country always. Loyalty to the government when it deserves it."

"When in doubt tell the truth."

"One must make allowances for a parental instinct that has been starving for twenty-five or thirty years. It is famished, it is crazed with hunger by that time, and will be entirely satisfied with anything that comes handy; its taste is atrophied, it can't tell mud cat from shad. A devil born to a young couple is measurably recognizable by them as a devil before long, but a devil adopted by an old couple is an angel to them, and remains so, through thick and thin."

"In certain trying circumstances urgent circumstances desperate circumstances profanity furnishes a relief denied even to prayer."

"My mother had a great deal of trouble with me, but I think she enjoyed it."

"Many a small thing has been made large by the right kind of advertising."

"Thousands of geniuses live and die undiscovered - either by themselves or by others. But for the Civil War, Lincoln and Grant and Sherman and Sheridan would not have been discovered, nor have risen into notice."

"Barring that natural expression of villainy which we all have the man looked honest enough."

"The face of the water, in time, became a wonderful book- a book that was a dead language to the uneducated passenger, but which told its mind to me without reserve, delivering its most cherished secrets as clearly as if it uttered them with a voice. And it was not a book to be read once and thrown aside, for it had a new story to tell every day."

"Nothing exists but you. And you are but a thought."

"If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything."

"It is not best that we should all think alike; it is a difference of opinion that makes horse races."

"Sanity and happiness are an impossible combination."

"When red-headed people are above a certain social grade their hair is auburn."

"Reality can be beaten with enough imagination."

"If you think it ain't dismal and lonesome out in a fog that way, by yourself, in the night, you try it once - you'll see."

"History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme."

"The government of my country snubs honest simplicity but fondles artistic villainy, and I think I might have developed into a very capable pickpocket if I had remained in the public service a year or two."

"To believe yourself brave is to be brave, it is the one only essential thing."

"Only kings, presidents, editors, and people with tapeworms have the right to use the editorial "we.""

"The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time."

"Forgiveness is the fragrance that the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it."

"George Washington, as a boy, was ignorant of the commonest accomplishments of youth. He could not even lie."

"Ideally a book would have no order to it, and the reader would have to discover his own."

"No sinner is ever saved after the first twenty minutes of a sermon."

"Conservatism is the blind and fear-filled worship of dead radicals."

"Facts are stubborn things, but statistics are pliable."

"Everything has its limit - iron ore cannot be educated into gold."

"The signs of excessive indulgence in this destructive pastime are easily detectable. They are these: A disposition to eat, to drink, to smoke, to meet together convivially, to laugh, to joke, and tell indelicate stories- and mainly, a yearning to paint pictures."

"Tom said to himself that it was not such a hollow world, after all. He had discovered a great law of human action, without knowing it -- namely, that in order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain."

"Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason."

"Occasionally, merely for the pleasure of being cruel, we put unoffending Frenchmen on the rack with questions framed in the incomprehensible jargon of their native language, and while they writhed, we impaled them, we peppered them, we scarified them, with their own vile verbs and participles."

"Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint."

"I deserve it all. Let the cold world do its worst; one thing I know--there's a grave somewhere for me. The world may go on just as its always done, and take everything from me--loved ones, property, everything--but it can't take that. Some day I'll lie down in it and forget it all, and my poor broken heart will be at rest."

"Heaven goes by favor. If it went by merit, you would stay out and your dog would go in."

"To be good is noble; but to show others how to be good is nobler and no trouble."

"A person with a new idea is a crank until the idea succeeds."

"Well, everybody does it that way, Huck.""Tom, I am not everybody."

"God made the Idiot for practice, and then He made the School Board."

"Kill the women? No, nobody ever saw anything in the books like that. You fetch them to the cave, and you're always as polite as pie to them; and by-and-by they fall in love with you and never want to go home any more."

"This explains why, whenever a person says sie to me, I generally try to kill him, if a stranger."

"He liked to like people therefore people liked him."

"There is no distinctly American criminal class - except Congress."