"We are here just for a spell and then pass on. So get a few laughs and do the best you can. Live your life so that whenever you lose it, you are ahead."

"An ignorant person is one who doesn't know what you have just found out."

"An onion can make people cry, but there has never been a vegetable invented to make them laugh."

"Personally, I have always felt the best doctor in the world is the veterinarian. He can't ask his patients what is the matter — he's got to just know."

"We all can't be heroes, for someone has to sit on the curb and clap as they go by."

"The movies are the only business where you can go out front and applaud yourself."

"The only time people dislike gossip is when you gossip about them."

"When you get into trouble 5,000 miles from home, you've got to have been looking for it."

"The United States never lost a war or won a conference."

"advertising [...] makes you spend money you haven't got for things you don't want."

"No party is as bad as its state and national leaders."

"We don't know what we want, but we are ready to bite somebody to get it."

"Our constitution protects aliens, drunks, and U. S. Senators. There ought to be one day (just one) when there is open season on senators."

"There ain't nothing that breaks up homes, country, and nations like somebody publishing their memoirs."

"I have always said that a conference was held for one reason only, to give everybody a chance to get sore at everybody else. Sometimes it takes two or three conferences to scare up a war, but generally one will do it."

"This country has gotten where it is in spite of politics, not by the aid of it. That we have carried as much political bunk as we have and still survived shows we are a super nation."

"I doubt if a charging elephant, or a rhino, is as determined, or hard to check, as a socially ambitious mother."

"I am a peace man. I haven't got any use for wars and there is no more humor in 'em than there is reason for 'em."

"This would be a great time in the world for some man to come along that knew something."

"Politics has got so expensive that it takes lots of money to even get beat with."

"I not only "don't choose to run" but I don't even want to leave a loophole in case I am drafted, so I won't "choose". I will say "won't run" no matter how bad the country will need a comedian by that time."

"I certainly know that [A] comedian can only last till he either takes himself serious or his audience takes him serious and I don't want either of those to happen to me til I am dead (if then)."

"We are the first nation to starve to death in a storehouse that's overfilled with everything we want."

"This country has come to feel the same when Congress is in session as when the baby gets hold of a hammer."

"This would be a great world to dance in if we didn't have to pay the fiddler."

"Half our life is spent trying to find something to do with the time we have rushed through life trying to save."

"You can't say that civilization don't advance, however, for in every war they kill you in a new way."

"But it's just as Mr. Brisbane and I have been constantly telling you, "Don't gamble"; take all your savings and buy some good stock, and hold it till it goes up, then sell it. If it don't go up, don't buy it."

"Sure must be a great consolation to the poor people who lost their stock in the late crash to know that it has fallen in the hands of Mr. Rockefeller, who will take care of it and see it has a good home and never be allowed to wander around unprotected again. There is one rule that works in every calamity. Be it pestilence, war, or famine, the rich get richer and poor get poorer. The poor even help arrange it."

"When the Judgment Day comes civilization will have an alibi, "I never took a human life, I only sold the fellow the gun to take it with.""

"This election was lost four and five and six years ago not this year. They dident start thinking of the old common fellow till just as they started out on the election tour. The money was all appropriated for the top in the hopes that it would trickle down to the needy. Mr. Hoover was an engineer. He knew that water trickled down. Put it uphill and let it go and it will reach the dryest little spot. But he dident know that money trickled up. Give it to the people at the bottom and the people at the top will have it before night anyhow. But it will at least have passed through the poor fellow's hands. They saved the big banks but the little ones went up the flue."

"I never met a man I didn't like."

"Heroing is one of the shortest-lived professions there is."

"You know everybody is ignorant, only on different subjects."

"Papers say: "Congress is deadlocked and can't act." I think that is the greatest blessing that could befall this country."

"Well, all I know is what I read in the papers."

"See they conducted experiments on convicts ... I don't know on what grounds they reason a man in jail is a bigger liar than one out of jail ... The chances are telling the truth is what got him there ... It would be a big aid to humanity, it will never be, for already the politicians are up in arms against it ... It would wreck the very foundation on which our political government is run ... If you ever injected truth into politics you'd have no politics ... Even the ministers are denouncing it now ... Humanity is not yet ready for either real truth or real harmony."

"I haven't a particle of confidence in a man who has no redeeming petty vices whatsoever."

"Mark Twain is a heroic figure in literature, and everybody who studies American literature or American history knows about Mark Twain as a great novelist. But how many people are taught in our schools or in our books that Mark Twain was a leader of the Anti-Imperialist League at the turn of the century? That he spoke out against the invasion of the Philippines?"

"Like Mark Twain, Eugene Field was an ardent dissenter against the prevailing social order in private conversation, although not much of that dissent was found in his writings-nor in Twain's. Both of those men were born too soon, or perhaps were just naturally cautious of being combative in public. They were cast by Fate into a period which we know today as the era of rugged individualism-a nation marching behind a banner bearing the legend: "Self conquers all!" Meaning, of course, that it's up to you alone-a doctrine which practically everybody across the land took for granted, and one which hangs on in spite of its falsity. Yet Field and Twain occasionally exhibited signs of doubt and wrote satirical comment on American life. Field poked fun at the shallow culture of the Chicago pork packers, and Mark Twain indulged in brief outbursts of anarchistic protest. None of their onsets, however, was incisive enough to make the big financiers question their loyalty to the existing economic and social system."

"I am persuaded that the future historian of America will find your works as indispensable to him as a French historian finds the political tracts of Voltaire."

"There is only one known video of Mark Twain,/wearing a white linen suit in 1909,/walking outside a house in Connecticut,/talking with Thomas Edison."

"From his earliest childhood young Clemens had been of an adventurous disposition. Before he was thirteen he had been extracted three times from the Mississippi and six times from Bear Creek in a substantially drowned condition, but his mother, with the high confidence in his future that never deserted her, merely remarked: "People who are born to be hanged are safe in the water.""

"All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn. But it's the best book we've had. All American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since."

"He [Mark Twain] spoke of humor, and thought it must be one of the chief attributes of God. He cited plants and animals that were distinctly humorous in form and in their characteristics. These he declared were God's jokes."

"If the writer is trying to interpret the meaning of life, all of what he writes is autobiographical. Think of Mark Twain, for example. You can tell from Twain's autobiography that Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn are versions, or imagined stages, of Twain himself. He was writing about his own life, about how it was or could have been. And he's still trying to reinterpret his life or to translate it when he is writing his autobiography, only he is not doing it with a mask anymore, rather as a testimony."

"[A] hack writer who would not have been considered fourth rate in Europe, who tricked out a few of the old proven 'sure fire' literary skeletons with sufficient local color to intrigue the superficial and the lazy."

"of course if Mark Twain had a little more courage Nigger Jim would have been more of the father figure that he obviously is, instead of a sort of Mammy figure that is part of the other tradition Twain has to deal with."

"I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure."