Quotes

[Sturgen]

Since quotes are becoming more important then wisdom around here, thought I would quote a man I consider one of the wisest in American literature.

 

A statesman gains little by the arbitrary exercise of ironclad authority upon all occasions that offer, for this wounds the just pride of his subordinates, and thus tends to undermine his strength. A little concession, now and then, where it can do no harm is the wiser policy.

- A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court

 

You ought never to "sass" old people- unless they "sass" you first.

- Advice for Good Little Girls

 

It is wrong to put a sheepskin under your shirt when you know that you are going to get a licking. It is better to retire swiftly to a secret place and weep over your bad conduct until the storm blows over.

- Advice for Good Little Boys

 

You should never do anything wicked and lay it on your brother, when it is just as convenient to lay it on some other boy.

- Advice for Good Little Boys

 

Be respectful to your superiors, if you have any.

- Advice to Young People speech, 4/15/1882

 

If I had been helping the Almighty when he created man, I would have had him begin at the other end, and start human beings with old age. How much better to start old and have all the bitterness and blindness of age in the beginning!

- Mark Twain, a Biography

 

Life should begin with age and its privileges and accumulations, and end with youth and its capacity to splendidly enjoy such advantages.

- Letter to Edward Dimmitt, 7/19/1901

 

I was young and foolish then; now I am old and foolisher.

- Mark Twain, a Biography

 

But we are fearfully and wonderfully made, and we glorious Americans will occasionally astonish the God that created us when we get a fair start.

- "The Bolters in Convention," Territorial Enterprise, 12/30/1863

 

We are called the nation of inventors. And we are. We could still claim that title and wear its loftiest honors if we had stopped with the first thing we ever invented, which was human liberty.

- Foreign Critics speech, 1890

 

The average American may not know who his grandfather was. But the American was, however, one degree better off than the average Frenchman who, as a rule, was in considerable doubt as to who his father was.

- quoted in "Stories of Mark Twain," C. D. Williard, Pacific Outlook, 4/30/1910

 

There is no character, howsoever good and fine, but it can be destroyed by ridicule, howsoever poor and witless. Observe the ass, for instance: his character is about perfect, he is the choicest spirit among all the humbler animals, yet see what ridicule has brought him to. Instead of feeling complimented when we are called an ass, we are left in doubt.

- Pudd'nhead Wilson

 

Concerning the difference between man and the jackass: some observers hold that there isn't any. But this wrongs the jackass.

- Notebook, 1898

 

It is full of interest. It has noble poetry in it; and some clever fables; and some blood-drenched history; and some good morals; and a wealth of obscenity; and upwards of a thousand lies.

- Letters from the Earth

 

The two Testaments are interesting, each in its own way. The Old one gives us a picture of these people's Deity as he was before he got religion, the other one gives us a picture of him as he appeared afterward.

- Letters from the Earth

 

The Christian's Bible is a drug store. Its contents remain the same; but the medical practice changes...The world has corrected the Bible. The church never corrects it; and also never fails to drop in at the tail of the procession- and take the credit of the correction. During many ages there were witches. The Bible said so. the Bible commanded that they should not be allowed to live. Therefore the Church, after eight hundred years, gathered up its halters, thumb-screws, and firebrands, and set about its holy work in earnest. She worked hard at it night and day during nine centuries and imprisoned, tortured, hanged, and burned whole hordes and armies of witches, and washed the Christian world clean with their foul blood.

Then it was discovered that there was no such thing as witches, and never had been. One does not know whether to laugh or to cry.....There are no witches. The witch text remains; only the practice has changed. Hell fire is gone, but the text remains. Infant damnation is gone, but the text remains. More than two hundred death penalties are gone from the law books, but the texts that authorized them remain.

- "Bible Teaching and Religious Practice," Europe and Elsewhere

 

When one reads Bibles, one is less surprised at what the Deity knows than at what He doesn't know.

- Mark Twain's Notebook

 

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

- Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc

 

The universal brotherhood of man is our most precious possession--what there is of it.

- Mark Twain's Notebook

 

The primary rule of business success is loyalty to your employer. That's all right--as a theory. What is the matter with loyalty to yourself?

- Speech, 3/30/1901

 

If the man doesn't believe as we do, we say he is a crank, and that settles it. It mean, it does nowadays, because now we can't burn him.

- Following the Equator

 

Between believing a thing and thinking you know is only a small step and quickly taken.

- "3,000 Years Among

 

Citizenship is what makes a republic; monarchies can get along without it.

- Speech 3/4/1906

 

Cizitenship should be placed above everything else, even learning. Is there in any college of the land a chair of citizenship where good citizenship and all that it implies is taught? There is not one--that is, not one where sane citizenship is taught. There are some which teach insane citizenship, bastard citizenship, but that is all. Patriotism! Yes; but patriotism is usually the refuge of the scoundrel. He is the man who talks the loudest.

- Speech, 5/14/1908

 

....every citizen of the republic ought to consider himself an unofficial policeman, and keep unsalaried watch and ward over the laws and their execution.

- "Traveling With a Reformer"

 

Good citizenship would teach accuracy of thinking and accuracy of statement.

- Speech, May 14, 1908

 

Communism is idiocy. They want to divide up the property. Suppose they did it -- it requires brains to keep money as well as make it. In a precious little while the money would be back in the former owner's hands and the communist would be poor again.

- Mark Twain, a Biography

 

Where was the use, originally, in rushing this whole globe through in six days? It is likely that if more time had been taken in the first place, the world would have been made right, and this ceaseless improving and repairing would not be necessary now. But if you hurry a world or a house, you are nearly sure to find out by and by that you have left out a towhead, or a broom-closet, or some other little convenience, here and there, which has got to be supplied, no matter how much expense or vexation it may cost.

- Life on the Mississippi

 

Man was made at the end of the week's work when God was tired.

- Mark Twain's Notebook

 

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

- Mark Twain, a Biography

 

If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and a man.

- Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar

 

A composite dog is a dog that's made up of all the valuable qualities that's in the dog breed--kind of a syndicate; and a mongrel is made up of the riffraff that's left over.

- Mark Twain in Eruption

 

The dog is a gentleman; I hope to go to his heaven, not man's.

- Letter to W. D. Howells, 4/2/1899

 

I believe our Heavenly Father invented man because he was disappointed in the monkey.

- Mark Twain in Eruption

 

It now seems plain to me that that theory ought to be vacated in favor of a new and truer one...the Descent of Man from the Higher Animals.

- "The Lowest Animal"

 

Man has been here 32,000 years. That it took a hundred million years to prepare the world for him is proof that that is what it was done for. I suppose it is. I dunno. If the Eiffel tower were now representing the world's age, the skin of paint on the pinnacle-knob at its summit would represent man's share of that age; & anybody would perceive that that skin was what the tower was built for. I reckon they would. I dunno.

- "Was the World Made for Man?"

I guess that really ought to be enough, if anyone wants f-z on the list let me know.

 

 

 

 

 

[purcelce]

"If it ain't broke don't fix it."

My Dad circa 1975

 

 

[eisely]

Another quote attributed to Mark Twain.

 

"The fewer lies I tell, the less I have to remember."

[Fuzzy Bear]

Fuzzy's quote closet:

 

When it is time to leave make sure you go.

 

When others speak, listen until you have to vomit.

 

If people were made of glass, it would be easier to figure them out.

 

When reaching beyond your means make sure that nobody sees you.

 

When I was 10 the world looked very big, now that I am 50 the world is no bigger than an onion. I think I need glasses.

 

and

 

The answers to the life's most perplexing questions can be found along side of the road rolled up in a small bundle and stuffed into a diet soda can.

 

This actually happened to me once. I had just started reading the answers and a semi-tractor-trailer truck went whizing by and blew the paper right from my hands over the bridge and into a fast running river far below. I still remember a couple of the answers, they are, yes and only if you are kind. I thought I would pass this information along just in case you haven't figured it out yet.

 

FB

 

[Region 7 Voyageur]

"A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in."

 

Greek Proverb

 

[evmori]

Sometimes it's better to be lucky than good!

 

Ed Mori

circa 2003(This message has been edited by evmori)

[Rooster7]

Proverbs 1

7 The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge,

but fools despise wisdom and discipline.

 

Proverbs 24

7 Wisdom is too high for a fool;

in the assembly at the gate he has nothing to say.

 

By the way, concerning - "Bible Teaching and Religious Practice," Europe and Elsewhere I hope you know enough about the world and the Bible, to know that the author of these quotes (see Sturgen's first post) does not know much about either.

 

[Big_Dog]

I still like:

 

"It is better to remain silent and appear a fool, than open your mouth and remove all doubt"

 

Twain?

 

bd

[NJCubScouter]

Rooster says:

 

By the way, concerning - "Bible Teaching and Religious Practice," Europe and Elsewhere I hope you know enough about the world and the Bible, to know that the author of these quotes (see Sturgen's first post) does not know much about either.

 

Although Sturgen's introduction does not come right out and say who all these quotes came from, and some of them are attributed only by title of the work (and not by author each time), it is clear that the author of all the quotes was Mark Twain. I'd say he knew quite a bit about the world, at least the world of his time and before, and most of his little quotes (only a fraction of which appear in Sturgen's posts) stand up pretty well today, though maybe you have to be somewhat cynical to appreciate some of them. As for what Mark Twain knew, and thought, about the Bible, I did an Internet search and came up with a couple of things I found interesting, though the first article requires a bit of time to read:

 

http://www.meadville.edu/eutsey_1_2.HTM

 

http://www.twainquotes.com/Religion.html

 

It seems to me from reading these that Mark Twain knew, and thought, quite a bit about the Bible, and also about how Christianity has been practiced as opposed to what's in the book. Amazingly enough, however, his knowledge and experience somehow lead him to conclusions other than those reached by Rooster.

[Rooster7]

NJ,

 

Your appreciation for Mark Twains revelations on the Bible and what appears to be a stereotype of Christian behavior is most telling.

 

While I appreciate Mark Twains wit, I do not consider him a theologian. Furthermore, his views of the world served his humor and editorials, not reality. The truth is, witches have lived amongst us for thousands of years. If you dont think so, try doing a little Internet search, youll find plenty of history to support that thought and plenty of individuals living today that are willing to wear that label. As to how various societies reacted to them, the people of those times and places are accountable no others. And I dare say, Im sure there were many people of other faiths, not to mention agnostics and atheists that behaved just as badly. So, Mr. Twains observations do not serve to prove any truth other than his apparent lack of understanding.

 

[packsaddle]

Big Dog, I was able to locate this by Graham Weeks to answer your question, I thought you might like it:

 

It is better to remain silent and be thought a fool, than to open your

mouth and remove all doubt . -- George Eliot

 

Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and

remove all doubt.-- Abraham Lincoln (also attr. Confucius)

 

It is better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a

fool than to open it and remove all doubt.-- Mark Twain (1835-1910)

 

A Yiddish proverb has been proposed as the origin, but if so it is

preceded by,

 

Even a fool, when he holdeth his peace, is counted wise: and he that

shutteth his lips is esteemed a man of understanding. -Proverbs 17:28.

 

 

Graham J Weeks

http://www.weeks-g.dircon.co.uk/ My quotations homepage

 

[Adrianvs]

OK, here it goes.. I submit for your enjoyment a list of quotes from the 'Colossal Genius' himself, G.K. Chesterton:

 

 

"The act of defending any of the cardinal virtues has today all the exhilaration of a vice." - A Defense of Humilities, The Defendant, 1901

 

"A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it." - Everlasting Man, 1925

 

"Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions." - ILN, 4/19/30

 

"Impartiality is a pompous name for indifference, which is an elegant name for ignorance." - The Speaker, 12/15/00

 

"An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered; an adventure is an inconvenience rightly considered." - On Running After Ones Hat, All Things Considered, 1908

 

"What embitters the world is not excess of criticism, but an absence of self-criticism." - Sidelights on New London and Newer New York

 

"He is a [sane] man who can have tragedy in his heart and comedy in his head." - Tremendous Trifles, 1909

 

"Among the rich you will never find a really generous man even by accident. They may give their money away, but they will never give themselves away; they are egotistic, secretive, dry as old bones. To be smart enough to get all that money you must be dull enough to want it." - A Miscellany of Men

 

"Moderate strength is shown in violence, supreme strength is shown in levity." - The Man Who was Thursday, 1908

 

"The simplification of anything is always sensational." - Varied Types

 

"Customs are generally unselfish. Habits are nearly always selfish." - ILN 1-11-08

 

"I believe what really happens in history is this: the old man is always wrong; and the young people are always wrong about what is wrong with him. The practical form it takes is this: that, while the old man may stand by some stupid custom, the young man always attacks it with some theory that turns out to be equally stupid." - ILN 6-3-22

 

"To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it." - A Short History of England, Ch.10

 

"All the exaggerations are right, if they exaggerate the right thing." - "On Gargoyles." Alarms and Discursions

 

"The comedy of man survives the tragedy of man." - ILN 2-10-06

 

"We have had no good comic operas of late, because the real world has been more comic than any possible opera." - The Quotable Chesterton

 

"When learned men begin to use their reason, then I generally discover that they haven't got any." - ILN 11-7-08

 

"Aesthetes never do anything but what they are told." - "The Love of Lead" Lunacy and Letters

 

"The aesthete aims at harmony rather than beauty. If his hair does not match the mauve sunset against which he is standing, he hurriedly dyes his hair another shade of mauve. If his wife does not go with the wall-paper, he gets a divorce." - ILN,12/25/09

 

"The reformer is always right about what is wrong. He is generally wrong about what is right." - ILN 10-28-22

 

"Reason is always a kind of brute force; those who appeal to the head rather than the heart, however pallid and polite, are necessarily men of violence. We speak of 'touching' a man's heart, but we can do nothing to his head but hit it." - "Charles II" Twelve Types

 

"Man is always something worse or something better than an animal; and a mere argument from animal perfection never touches him at all. Thus, in sex no animal is either chivalrous or obscene. And thus no animal invented anything so bad as drunkeness - or so good as drink." - All Things Considered

 

"A thing may be too sad to be believed or too wicked to be believed or too good to be believed; but it cannot be too absurd to be believed in this planet of frogs and elephants, of crocodiles and cuttle-fish." - Maycock, The Man Who Was Orthodox

 

"Progress is a comparative of which we have not settled the superlative." - Chapter 2, Heretics, 1905

 

"Men invent new ideals because they dare not attempt old ideals. They look forward with enthusiasm, because they are afraid to look back." - What's Wrong With The World, 1910

 

"Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to that arrogant oligarchy who merely happen to be walking around." - Orthodoxy, 1908

 

"The modern world is a crowd of very rapid racing cars all brought to a standstill and stuck in a block of traffic." - ILN, 5/29/26

 

"A detective story generally describes six living men discussing how it is that a man is dead. A modern philosophic story generally describes six dead men discussing how any man can possible be alive." - A Miscellany of Men

 

"To hurry through one's leisure is the most unbusiness-like of actions." - "A Somewhat Improbable Story." Tremendous Trifles

 

"The past is not what it was." - A Short History of England

 

"War is not 'the best way of settling differences; it is the only way of preventing their being settled for you." - ILN, 7/24/15

 

"There is a corollary to the conception of being too proud to fight. It is that the humble have to do most of the fighting." - Everlasting Man, 1925

 

"The only defensible war is a war of defense." - Autobiography, 1937

 

"The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him." - ILN, 1/14/11

 

"How quickly revolutions grow old; and, worse still, respectable." - The Listener. 3-6-35

 

"Once abolish the God, and the government becomes the God." - Christendom in Dublin, 1933

 

"America is the only country ever founded on a creed." - What I Saw In America, 1922

 

"The Declaration of Independence dogmatically bases all rights on the fact that God created all men equal; and it is right; for if they were not created equal, they were certainly evolved unequal. There is no basis for democracy except in a dogma about the divine origin of man." - Chapter 19, What I Saw In America, 1922

 

"The unconscious democracy of America is a very fine thing. It is a true and deep and instinctive assumption of the equality of citizens, which even voting and elections have not destroyed." - What I Saw In America, 1922

 

"When you break the big laws, you do not get freedom; you do not even get anarchy. You get the small laws." - Daily News, 7/29/05

 

"He is a very shallow critic who cannot see an eternal rebel in the heart of a conservative." - Varied Types

 

"You can never have a revolution in order to establish a democracy. You must have a democracy in order to have a revolution. - Tremendous Trifles, 1909

 

"It is the mark of our whole modern history that the masses are kept quiet with a fight. They are kept quiet by the fight because it is a sham-fight; thus most of us know by this time that the Party System has been popular only in the sense that a football match is popular." - A Short History of England. 156

 

"It is terrible to contemplete how few politicians are hanged." - The Cleveland Press, 3/1/21

 

"There cannot be a nation of millionaires, and there never has been a nation of Utopian comrades; but there have been any number of nations of tolerably contented peasants." Outline of Sanity CW. V. 192

 

"It is a good sign in a nation when things are done badly. It shows that all the people are doing them. And it is bad sign in a nation when such things are done very well, for it shows that only a few experts and eccentrics are doing them, and that the nation is merely looking on." - "Patriotism and Sport," All Things Considered

 

"The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of the Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being corrected." - ILN, 4/19/24

 

"With all that we hear of American hustle and hurry, it is rather strange that Americans seem to like to linger on longer words." - What I Saw in America

 

"Love means loving the unlovable - or it is no virtue at all." - Heretics, 1905

 

"Marriage is a duel to the death which no man of honour should decline." - Manalive

 

"The first two facts which a healthy boy or girl feels about sex are these: first that it is beautiful and then that it is dangerous." - ILN 1/9/09

 

"The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because they are generally the same people." - ILN, 7/16/10

 

"If there were no God, there would be no atheists." - Where All Roads Lead, 1922

 

"There are those who hate Christianity and call their hatred an all-embracing love for all religions." - ILN, 1/13/06

 

"The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried." - Chapter 5, What's Wrong With The World, 1910

 

"The riddles of God are more satisfying than the solutions of man." - Introduction to the Book of Job, 1907

 

"The truth is, of course, that the curtness of the Ten Commandments is an evidence, not of the gloom and narrowness of a religion, but, on the contrary, of its liberality and humanity. It is shorter to state the things forbidden than the things permitted: precisely because most things are permitted, and only a few things are forbidden." - ILN 1-3-20

 

"Men do not differ much about what things they will call evils; they differ enormously about what evils they will call excusable." - ILN, 10/23/09

 

"It's not that we don't have enough scoundrels to curse; it's that we don't have enough good men to curse them." - ILN, 3/14/08

 

"There is a case for telling the truth; there is a case for avoiding the scandal; but there is no possible defense for the man who tells the scandal, but does not tell the truth." - ILN, 7/18/08

 

"Idolatry is committed, not merely by setting up false gods, but also by setting up false devils; by making men afraid of war or alcohol, or economic law, when they should be afraid of spiritual corruption and cowardice." - ILN 9/11/09

 

"All science, even the divine science, is a sublime detective story. Only it is not set to detect why a man is dead; but the darker secret of why he is alive." - The Thing. CW. III 191

 

"Modern broad-mindedness benefits the rich; and benefits nobody else." - "The Church of the Servile State" Utopia of Usurers

 

"Big Business and State Socialism are very much alike, especially Big Business." - G.K.'s Weekly, 4/10/26

 

"[No society can survive the socialist] fallacy that there is an absolutely unlimited number of inspired officials and an absolutely unlimited amount of money to pay them." - The Debate with Bertrand Russell, BBC Magazine, 11/27/35

 

"The real argument against aristocracy is that it always means the rule of the ignorant. For the most dangerous of all forms of ignorance is ignorance of work." - NY Sun 11-3-18

 

"Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere." - ILN, 5/5/28

 

"The decay of society is praised by artists as the decay of a corpse is praised by worms." - Shaw, 1909

 

"The artistic temperament is a disease that afflicts amateurs." - Chapter 16, Heretics, 1905

 

"Properly speaking, of course, there is no such thing as a return to nature, because there is no such thing as a departure from it. The phrase reminds one of the slightly intoxicated gentleman who gets up in his own dining room and declares firmly that he must be getting home." - Chesterton Review, August, 1993

 

"Let all the babies be born. Then let us drown those we do not like." - Babies and Distributism, GK's Weekly, 11/12/32

 

"A modern vegetarian is also a teetotaler, yet there is no obvious connection between consuming vegetables and not consuming fermented vegetables. A drunkard, when lifted laboriously out of the gutter, might well be heard huskily to plead that he had fallen there through excessive devotion to a vegetable diet."

 

"You cannot grow a beard in a moment of passion." - "How I Met the President" Tremendous Trifles

[NJCubScouter]

My favorite quotation is:

 

"No good deed goes unpunished."

 

This is most often attributed to Clare Booth Luce, but also to Dorothy Parker, Oscar Wilde and others in both the 19th and 20th centuries. There does not seem to be a definitive answer.

 

To me it sounds like Dorothy Parker, who also is my favorite "sayer" of things. Originally I had links here to 2 web sites with a lot of her quotes, including the ones I have repeated below, with a sort of "parental guidance" label due to the racy nature of some of her sayings. After I finished reading them I decided I'd better not link to them at all due to some of the colorful language. But a Yahoo search on "dorothy parker quotes" should turn them up. Below are some of my favorite clean ones, which I think are the funnier ones anyway.

 

 

"She ran the gamut of emotions from 'A' to 'B.'"

(Said to be spoken about Katherine Hepburn's performance in a movie.)

 

"If you want to know what god thinks of money, just look at the people he gave it to. "

 

"This novel is not to be tossed lightly aside, but to be hurled with great force." (This one gets five stars from me.)

 

"I'm never going to be famous. My name will never be writ large on the roster of Those Who Do Things. I don't do any thing. Not one single thing. I used to bite my nails, but I don't even do that any more."

 

"I don't care what is written about me so long as it isn't true. "

 

On learning that Calvin Coolidge was dead she remarked,

"How could they tell?"

 

Under interrogation by the FBI: "Listen, I can't even get my dog to stay down. Do I look like someone who could overthrow the government?"

 

"If you don't have anything nice to say, come sit by me..." (Four and a half stars.)

 

"I was the toast of two continents: Greenland and Australia. "

 

"Money cannot buy health, but I'd settle for a diamond-studded wheelchair."

[dsteele]

My favorite quote (I know it's only 3:39 PM on a Monday, but hey, I'm moving soon and am on vacation ) has to do with "Silent Cal" Calvin Coolidge.

 

He was a man of few words. At a dinner party, a woman turned to him and said, "My friend bet me that you wouldn't say more than two words all evening. I think she's wrong, don't you?"

 

Calvin looked at her and said, "You lose."

 

And that was it.

 

DS

[Sparkie]

Here are some of my favorites, short and sweet:

 

If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember what you said.

 

Focus on what you have to do, not what you've already done.

 

You are better than the worse thing you've done.

 

You may be one person to the world, but to one person you are the world.

 

It's never too late to be what you might have been (George Elliot)

 

Sparkie