Ethics and Morality

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.

A nihilist is a man who does not bow down before any authority, who does not take any principle on faith, whatever reverence thatprinciple may be enshrined in.

Not until I went into the churches of Americaand heard her pulpits flame with righteousness did I understand the secret of her genius andpower. America is great because America is good, and if America ever ceases to be good America will cease to be great.

In America there are no nobles or literarymen, and the people is apt to mistrust thewealthy; lawyers consequently form the highest political class, and the most cultivated circle ofsociety. They have therefore nothing to gain by innovation, which adds a conservative interest to their natural taste for public order. If I were asked where I place the American aristocracy, I should reply without hesitation, that it is notcomposed of the rich, who are united together by no common tie, but that it occupies the judicial bench and the bar.

[ Reply to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s questioning whyThoreau had gone to jail in 1843 for not paying the Massachusetts poll tax as a protest against slavery :] Why are you not here also?

The fate of the country . . . does not dependon what kind of paper you drop into the ballot box once a year, but on what kind of man you drop from your chamber into the street every morning.

When I meet a government which says to me, “Your money or your life,” why should I be in haste to give it my money?

I do not hesitate to say, that those who call themselves Abolitionists should at onceeffectually withdraw their support, both in person and property, from the government of Massachusetts, and not wait until theyconstitute a majority of one, before they sufferthe right to prevail through them. I think thatit is enough if they have God on their side, without waiting for that other one. Moreover, any man more right than his neighborsconstitutes a majority of one already.

If the injustice is part of the necessary friction of the machine of government, let it go, let itgo: perchance it will wear smooth,—certainly the machine will wear out. If the injusticehas a spring, or a pulley, or a rope, or acrank, exclusively for itself, then perhaps you may consider whether the remedy will notbe worse than the evil; but if it is of such anature that it requires you to be the agent ofinjustice to another, then, I say, break the law.Let your life be a counter-friction to stop themachine.

The mass of men serve the state thus, notas men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies. They are the standing army, and themilitia, jailers, constables, posse comitatus, etc.In most cases there is no free exercise whateverof the judgement or of the moral sense; butthey put themselves on a level with wood andearth and stones; and wooden men can perhapsbe manufactured that will serve the purposeas well.

I think that we should be men first, andsubjects afterwards. It is not desirable tocultivate a respect for the law, so much as forthe right. The only obligation which I havea right to assume is to do at any time what Ithink right.