"The most interesting information comes from children, for they tell all they know and then stop."

"Truth is mighty and will prevail. There is nothing wrong with this, except that it ain't so."

"The educated Southerner has no use for an 'R', except at the beginning of a word."

"I have had an aversion to good spelling for sixty years and more, merely for the reason that when I was a boy there was not a thing I could do creditably except spell according to the book. It was a poor and mean distinction, and I early learned to disenjoy it. I suppose that this is because the ability to spell correctly is a talent, not an acquirement. There is some dignity about an acquirement, because it is a product of your own labor. It is earned, whereas to be able to do a thing merely by the grace of God, and not by your own effort, transfers the thing to our heavenly home--where possibly it is a matter of pride and satisfaction, but it leaves you naked and bankrupt."

"I wish I could make him understand that a loving good heart is riches enough, and that without it intellect is poverty."

"What would the new teacher, representing France, teach us? Railroading? No. France knows nothing valuable about railroading. Steamshipping? No. France has no superiorities over us in that matter. Steamboating? No. French steamboating is still of Fulton's date--1809. Postal service? No. France is a back number there. Telegraphy? No, we taught her that ourselves. Journalism? No. Magazining? No, that is our own specialty. Government? No; Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, Nobility, Democracy, Adultery the system is too variegated for our climate. Religion? No, not variegated enough for our climate. Morals? No, we cannot rob the poor to enrich ourselves."

"There isn't time, so brief is life, for bickerings, apologies, heartburnings, callings to account. There is only time for loving, and but an instant, so to speak, for that."

"Drag your thoughts away from your troubles... by the ears, by the heels, or any other way you can manage it."

"I don't give a damn for a man that can only spell a word one way."

"There are people who can do all fine and heroic things but one - keep from telling their happiness to the unhappy."

"The government is merely a servant, merely a temporary servant; it cannot be its prerogative to determine what is right and what is wrong, and decide who is a patriot and who isn't. Its function is to obey orders, not originate them."

"Who gave his angels eternal happiness unearned, yet required his other children to earn it?"

"Substitute 'damn' every time you're inclined to write 'very, ' your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be."

"The gentle reader will never, never know what a consummate ass he can become until he goes abroad. I speak now, of course, in the supposition that the gentle reader has not been abroad, and therefore is not already a consummate ass. If the case be otherwise, I beg his pardon and extend to him the cordial hand of fellowship and call him brother. I shall always delight to meet an ass after my own heart when I have finished my travels."

"Children have but little charity for each other's defects."

"Tom Sawyer the Pirate looked around upon the envying juveniles about him and confessed in his heart that this was the proudest moment of his life."

"When your friends begin to flatter you on how young you look, it's a sure sign you're getting old."

"I followed the other Experiment around, yesterday afternoon, at a distance, to see what it might be for, if I could. But I was not able to make [it] out. I think it is a man. I had never seen a man, but it looked like one, and I feel sure that that is what it is. I realize that I feel more curiosity about it than about any of the other reptiles. If it is a reptile, and I suppose it is; for it has frowzy hair and blue eyes, and looks like a reptile. It has no hips; it tapers like a carrot; when it stands, it spreads itself apart like a derrick; so I think it is a reptile, though it may be architecture."

"An honest politician is an oxymoron."

"It is just like man's vanity and impertinence to call an animal dumb because it is dumb to his dull perceptions."

"Humor is mankind's greatest blessing."

"Principles have no real force except when one is well-fed."

"Reader, suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself."

"I can live for two months on a good compliment."

"The human race is a race of cowards; and I am not only marching in that procession but carrying a banner."

"The radical invents the views. When he has worn them out the conservative adopts them."

"When even the brightest mind in our world has been trained up from childhood in a superstition of any kind, it will never be possible for that mind, in its maturity, to examine sincerely, dispassionately, and conscientiously any evidence or any circumstance which shall seem to cast a doubt upon the validity of that superstition. I doubt if I could do it myself."

"The trouble ain't that there is too many fools, but that the lightning ain't distributed right."

"Honesty: The best of all the lost arts."

"Experience is an author's most valuable asset, experience is the thing that puts the muscle and the breath and the warm blood into the book he writes."

"In your country and mine we should have the privilege of making fun of this kind of morality, but it would be unkind to do it here.Many of these people have the reasoning faculty, but no one uses it in religious matters."

"Everything human is pathetic. The secret source of humor itself is not joy but sorrow. There is no humor in heaven."

"This nation is like all the others that have been spewed upon the earth - ready to shout for any cause that will tickle its vanity or fill its pocket. What a hell of a heaven it will be when they get all these hypocrites assembled there!"

"There are many humorous things in the world; among them, the white man's notion that he is less savage than the other savages."

"Peace by persuasion has a pleasant sound, but I think we should not be able to work it. We should have to tame the human race first, and history seems to show that that cannot be done."

"A public library is the most enduring of memorials, the trustiest monument for the preservation of an event or a name or an affection; for it, and it only, is respected by wars and revolutions, and survives."

"No country can be well governed unless its citizens as a body keep religiously before their minds that they are the guardians of the law, and that the law officers are only the machinery for its execution, nothing more."

"A mighty porterhouse steak an inch and a half thick, hot and sputtering from the griddle; dusted with fragrant pepper; enriched with little melting bits of butter of the most impeachable freshness and genuineness; the precious juices of the meat trickling out and joining the gravy, archipelagoed with mushrooms; a township or two of tender, yellowish fat gracing an out-lying district of this ample county of beefsteak; the long white bone which divides the sirloin from the tenderloin still in its place."

"Nothing that grieves us can be called little: by the eternal laws of proportion a child's loss of a doll and a king's loss of a crown are events of the same size."

"It don't make no difference whether you do right or wrong, a person's conscience ain't got no sense, and just goes for him anyway."

"Like it! Yes-the way I'd like a hot stove if I was to set on it long enough. No, Tom, I won't be rich, and I won't live in them cussed smothery houses. I like the woods, and the river, and hogsheads, and I'll stick to 'em, too."

"If books are not good company, where shall I find it?"

"To be satisfied with what one has that is wealth. As long as one sorely needs a certain additional amount that man isn't rich."

"Don't say the old lady screamed. Bring her on and let her scream."

"A man is accepted into a church for what he believes and he is turned out for what he knows."

"It isn't so astonishing the number of things that I can remember as the number of things I can remember that aren't so."

"Darwin abolished special creations, contributed the Origin of Species and hitched all life together in one unbroken procession."

"You can't pray a lie - I found that out."

"In prayer we call ourselves 'worms of the dust' but it is only on a sort of tacit understanding that the remark shall not be taken at par."

"Be good and you will be lonesome."