Mark Twain - Human Quotes

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Damn these human beings; if I had invented them I would go hide my head in a bag.

Mark Twain
... when the human race is not grotesque it is because it is asleep and losing its opportunity.

Mark Twain
Sane and intelligent human beings are like all other human beings, and carefully and cautiously and diligently conceal their private real opinions from the world and give out fictitious ones in their stead for general consumption.

Mark Twain
I have damaged my intellect trying to imagine why a man should want to invent a repeating clock, and how another man could be found to lust after it and buy it. The man who can guess these riddles is far on the way to guess why the human race was invented - which is another riddle which tires me.

Mark Twain
Loyalty to petrified opinions never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul in this world — and never will.

Mark Twain
Does the human being reason? No; he thinks, muses, reflects, but does not reason...that is, in the two things which are the peculiar domain of the heart, not the mind, politics and religion. He doesn't want to know the other side. He wants arguments and statistics for his own side, and nothing more.

Mark Twain
I can stand any society. All that I care to know is that a man is a human being—that is enough for me; he can't be any worse.

Mark Twain
Jesus died to save men — a small thing for an immortal to do, & didn't save many, anyway; but if he had been damned for the race that would have been act of a size proper to a god, & would have saved the whole race. However, why should anybody want to save the human race, or damn it either? Does God want its society? Does Satan?

Mark Twain
If we would learn what the human race really is at bottom, we need only observe it in election times.

Mark Twain
Whenever the human race assembles to a number exceeding four, it cannot stand free speech.

Mark Twain
A policeman in plain clothes is a man; in his uniform he is ten. Clothes and title are the most potent thing, the most formidable influence, in the earth. They move the human race to willing and spontaneous respect for the judge, the general, the admiral, the bishop, the ambassador, the frivolous earl, the idiot duke, the sultan, the king, the emperor. No great title is efficient without clothes to support it.

Mark Twain
The pulpit and the optimist are always talking about the human race's steady march toward ultimate perfection. As usual, they leave out the statistics. It is the pulpit's way - the optimist's way.

Mark Twain
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.

Mark Twain
Human beings seem to be a poor invention. If they are the noblest works of God where is the ignoblest?

Mark Twain
I have no color prejudices nor caste prejudices nor creed prejudices. All I care to know is that a man is a human being, and that is enough for me; he can't be any worse.

Mark Twain
I have been reading the morning paper. I do it every morning-knowing well that I shall find in it the usual depravities and basenesses and hypocrisies and cruelties that make up civilization, and cause me to put in the rest of the day pleading for the damnation of the human race. I cannot seem to get my prayers answered, yet I do not despair.

Mark Twain
A person who has during all time maintained the imposing position of spiritual head of four-fifths of the human race, and political head of the whole of it, must be granted the possession of executive abilities of the loftiest order.

Mark Twain
Civilization largely consists in hiding human nature. When the barbarian learns to hide it we account him enlightened.

Mark Twain
I am not interested to know whether vivisection produces results that are profitable to the human race or doesn't...The pain which it inflicts upon unconsenting animals is the basis of my enmity toward it, and it is to me sufficient justification of the enmity without looking further.

Mark Twain
Adam was but human—this explains it all. He did not want the apple for the apple's sake; he wanted it only because it was forbidden.

Mark Twain
Human nature is the same everywhere; it deifies success, it has nothing but scorn for defeat.

Mark Twain
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.

Mark Twain
To be human is to have one's little modicum of romance secreted away in one's composition. One never ceases to make a hero of one's self, (in private,) during life, but only alters the style of heroism from time to time as the drifting years belittle certain gods of his admiration and raise up others in their stead.

Mark Twain
Mr. Roosevelt is the most formidable disaster that has befallen the country since the Civil War—but the vast mass of the nation loves him, is frantically fond of him, even idolizes him. This is the simple truth. It sounds like a libel upon the intelligence of the human race, but it isn't; there isn't any way to libel the intelligence of the human race.

Mark Twain
A human being has a natural desire to have more of a good thing than he needs.

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

Mark Twain
The happy phrasing of a compliment is one of the rarest of human gifts, and the happy delivery of it another.

Mark Twain
The human race has one really effective weapon, and that is laughter.

Mark Twain
The institution of royalty in any form is an insult to the human race.

Mark Twain
You have noticed that the human being is a curiosity. In times past he has had (and worn out and flung away) hundreds and hundreds of religions; today he has hundreds and hundreds of religions, and launches not fewer than three new ones every year. I could enlarge on that number and still be within the facts.

Mark Twain