Ethics and Morality

Who were the fools who spread the story that brute force cannot kill ideas? Nothing is easier. And once they are dead they are no more than corpses.

The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.

The trouble with our people is as soon as they got out of slavery they didn’t want to give thewhite man nothing else. But the fact is, you gotto give ’em something. Either your money, your land, your woman, or your ass.

I want my attorney, my tailor, my valets, andeven my wife to believe in God, and I fancy that then I’ll be robbed and cuckolded less.

That generous maxim, that it is much moreprudence to acquit two persons, though actually guilty, than to pass sentence of condemnationon one that is virtuous and innocent.

[Christian nations are the most enlightenedand progressive] in spite of their religion, not because of it. The Church has opposed every innovation and discovery from the day of Galileo down to our own time, when the use of anesthetics in child-birth was regarded as a sin because it avoided the biblical curse pronounced against Eve.

God made man, without man’s consent, andmade his nature, too; made it vicious instead of angelic, and then said, Be angelic, or I will punish you and destroy you. But no matter, God is responsible for everything man does, all the same; He can’t get around that fact.There is only one Criminal, and it is not man.

You tell me whar a man gits his corn pone, en I’ll tell you what his ’pinions is.

I would throw out the old maxim, “Mycountry, right or wrong,” and instead I would say, “My country when she is right.”

I have no race prejudices, and I think I have no color prejudices nor caste prejudices nor creed prejudices. Indeed, I know it. I canstand any society. All that I care to know isthat a man is a human being—that is enough for me; he can’t be any worse.

He is the only animal that loves his neighbor as himself, and cuts his throat if his theology isn’tstraight.

Even the clearest and most perfectcircumstantial evidence is likely to be at fault, after all, and therefore ought to be received with great caution. Take the case of any pencil, sharpened by any woman: if you have witnesses, you will find she did it with a knife; but if you take simply the aspect of the pencil, you will say she did it with her teeth.

When I reflect upon the number ofdisagreeable people who I know have gone to a better world, I am moved to lead a different life.

Tell the truth or trump—but get the trick.

Bill Styles . . . spoke of the low grade of legislative morals. “Kind of discouraging. You see, it’s so hard to find men of a so high type of morals that they’ll stay bought .”

Dying man couldn’t make up his mind which place to go to—both have their advantages, “heaven for climate, hell for company!”

It was a close place. I took it up, and held itin my hand. I was trembling, because I’d got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself: “All right, then, I’ll go to hell”—and tore it up.

I thought a minute, and says to myself, holdon,—s’pose you’d a done right and give Jim up; would you felt better than what you do now?No, says I, I’d feel bad—I’d feel just the sameway I do now. Well, then, says I, what’s the use you learning to do right, when it’s troublesome to do right and ain’t no trouble to do wrong, and the wages is just the same?

What chance has the ignorant, uncultivated liar against the educated expert? What chance have I . . . against a lawyer?

A pretty air in an opera is prettier there than it could be anywhere else, I suppose, just as anhonest man in politics shines more than hewould elsewhere.

He [Tom Sawyer] had discovered a great law ofhuman 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. If he had been a great andwise philosopher, like the writer of this book, he would now have comprehended that Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do andthat Play consists of whatever a body is notobliged to do.

The chances are that a man cannot get into congress now without resorting to arts and means that should render him unfit to gothere.

To my mind Judas Iscariot was nothing but a low, mean, premature Congressman.

[ Deleted dedication of Twain’s book RoughingIt:] To the Late Cain, This Book is Dedicated, Not on account of respect for his memory, for it merits little respect; not on accountof sympathy with him, for his bloody deedplaced him without the pale of sympathy, strictly speaking; but out of a mere humancommiseration for him in that it was hismisfortune to live in a dark age that knew notthe beneficent Insanity Plea.