Mark Twain on argument

Never argue with stupid people, they will drag you down to their level and then beat you with experience.

~ Mark Twain

Mark Twain on education

Education consists mainly of what we have unlearned.

I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.

Education is the path from cocky ignorance to miserable uncertainty.

~ Mark Twain

(Quoted by Steve Berger, presentation to Mises University, 7:55 mark, August 6, 2008.)

Rolf Dobelli quotes Charlie Munger on the "man with the hammer tendency"

"If your only tool is a hammer, all your problems will be nails," said Mark Twain - a quote that sums up the déformation professionnelle perfectly.  Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett's business partner, named the effect the "man with the hammer tendency" after Twain: "But that's a perfectly disastrous way to think and a perfectly disastrous way to operate in the world.  So you've got to have multiple models.  And the models have to come from multiple disciplines - because all the wisdom of the world is not to be found in one little academic department."

~ Rolf Dobelli, The Art of Thinking Clearly, "Those Wielding Hammers See Only Nails," pp. 275-276

Mark Twain on the Mississippi River's influence on his writing

The face of the water, in time, became a wonderful book- a book that was a dead language to the uneducated passenger, but which told its mind to me without reserve, delivering its most cherished secrets as clearly as if it uttered them with a voice. And it was not a book to be read once and thrown aside, for it had a new story to tell every day.

~ Mark Twain

Mississippi River Bridge
1898

Mark Twain on risk taking

Why not go out on a limb? That's where the fruit is!

~ Mark Twain

Mark Twain on speculation

There are two times in a man’s life when he should not speculate: when he can’t afford it, and when he can. 

~ Mark Twain

Mark Twain on fooling people

It's easier to fool people than it is to convince them they have been fooled.

~ Mark Twain

Mark Twain on politicians and change

Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason.

~ Mark Twain

Mark Twain on voting

If voting made any difference they wouldn't let us do it.

~ Mark Twain

Mark Twain on the difference between reality and fiction

The only difference between reality and fiction is that fiction needs to be credible.

~ Mark Twain

Mark Twain on praise

I can live for two months on a good compliment.

~ Mark Twain

Mark Twain on innovation

You can't depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.

~ Mark Twain, novelist, journalist

Samuel L. Clemens
1940

Mark Twain on elitists

When red-headed people are above a certain social grade their hair is auburn.

~ Mark Twain

Mark Twain on travel

Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts.  Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.

~ Mark Twain

Mark Twain on tolerance

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

~ Mark Twain

Mark Twain on American imperialism in the Pacific

I left these shores, at Vancouver, a red-hot imperialist. I wanted the American eagle to go screaming into the Pacific ...Why not spread its wings over the Philippines, I asked myself? ... I said to myself, Here are a people who have suffered for three centuries. We can make them as free as ourselves, give them a government and country of their own, put a miniature of the American Constitution afloat in the Pacific, start a brand new republic to take its place among the free nations of the world. It seemed to me a great task to which we had addressed ourselves. But I have thought some more, since then, and I have read carefully the treaty of Paris, and I have seen that we do not intend to free, but to subjugate the people of the Philippines. We have gone there to conquer, not to redeem. It should, it seems to me, be our pleasure and duty to make those people free, and let them deal with their own domestic questions in their own way. And so I am an anti-imperialist. I am opposed to having the eagle put its talons on any other land.

~ Mark Twain, New York Herald (1900)

Mark Twain on history

History doesn't repeat itself - at best it sometimes rhymes.

~ Mark Twain

Mark Twain on Congress

There is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress.

Mark Twain on taxation

The only difference between a tax man and a taxidermist is that the taxidermist leaves the skin.

~ Mark Twain

Mark Twain on elitists who run the world

Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on... or by imbeciles who really mean it.

~ Mark Twain