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Mark Twain -
Human
Quotes
65 Sourced Quotes
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Civilization largely consists in hiding human nature. When the barbarian learns to hide it we account him enlightened.
Mark Twain
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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
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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.
Mark Twain
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The pilgrims were human beings. Otherwise they would have acted differently. They had come a long and difficult journey, and now when the journey was nearly finished, and they learned that the main thing they had come for had ceased to exist, they didn't do as horses or cats or angle-worms would probably have done — turn back and get at something profitable — no, anxious as they had before been to see the miraculous fountain, they were as much as forty times as anxious now to see the place where it had used to be. There is no accounting for human beings.
Mark Twain
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The institution of royalty in any form is an insult to the human race.
Mark Twain
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The human race has one really effective weapon, and that is laughter.
Mark Twain
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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
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Everything human is pathetic. The secret source of Humor itself is not joy but sorrow. There is no humor in heaven.
Mark Twain
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A human being has a natural desire to have more of a good thing than he needs.
Mark Twain
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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
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There are times when one would like to hang the whole human race, and finish the farce.
Mark Twain
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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
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Human nature is the same everywhere; it deifies success, it has nothing but scorn for defeat.
Mark Twain
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The human race was always interesting and we know by its past that it will always continue so, monotonously.
Mark Twain
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It seems to be a law of the human constitution that those that deserve shall not have, and those that do not deserve shall get everything that is worth having. It is a sufficiently crazy arrangement, it seems to me.
Mark Twain
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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
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What is it that confers the noblest delight? What is that which swells a man's breast with pride above that which any other experience can bring to him? Discovery! To know that you are walking where none others have walked; that you are beholding what human eye has not seen before; that you are breathing a virgin atmosphere.
Mark Twain
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Adam's temperament was the first command the Deity ever issued to a human being on this planet. And it was the only command Adam would never be able to disobey. It said, "Be weak, be water, be characterless, be cheaply persuadable." The later command, to let the fruit alone, was certain to be disobeyed. Not by Adam himself, but by his temperament — which he did not create and had no authority over.
Mark Twain
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The symbol of the race ought to be a human being carrying an ax, for every human being has one concealed about him somewhere, and is always seeking the opportunity to grind it.
Mark Twain
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Human beings seem to be a poor invention. If they are the noblest works of God where is the ignoblest?
Mark Twain
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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
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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
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The joy of killing! the joy of seeing killing done - these are traits of the human race at large.
Mark Twain
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Whenever the human race assembles to a number exceeding four, it cannot stand free speech.
Mark Twain
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If we would learn what the human race really is at bottom, we need only observe it in election times.
Mark Twain
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Quote of the day
Life is not having been told that the man has just waxed the floor.
Ogden Nash
Mark Twain
Creative Commons
Born:
November 30, 1835
Died:
April 21, 1910
(aged 74)
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