Rambling, unedited, too long, and altogether perfect, this is a must-have for Mark Twain fans. I can't wait for the next volume to be out (it's supposed to be 3). Published by the Mark Twain project, this is the untouched text of the memories Mark Twain dictated over his final years of life, with the instructions that they weren't to be released until 100 years after his death. This gimmick allowed him to be brutally honest, without fear of offending people who would be long dead before the book came out.
What came out is not surprising, to anyone who has read his other autobiographical works, except for a few moments of near-mad sanity, as when in his strong opposition to the war in the Phillipines, he calls the American troops murderers (describing some of the atrocities committed then).
If you like Mark Twain, and if you're going to read only one book this year, make this the one.
Quotes:
We were always going to be rich next year—no occasion to work. It is good to begin life poor; it is good to begin life rich—these are wholesome; but to begin it prospectively rich! The man who has not experienced it cannot imagine the curse of it.
The North thinks it knows how to make corn bread, but this is gross superstition.
It seems a pity that the world should throw away so many good things merely because they are unwholesome.
For we were little Christian children, and had early been taught the value of forbidden fruit.
We were comrades, and yet not comrades; color and condition interposed a subtle line which both parties were conscious of
In my schoolboy days I had no aversion to slavery. I was not aware that there was anything wrong about it. No one arraigned it in my hearing; the local papers said nothing against it; the local pulpit taught us that God approved it, that it was a holy thing, and that the doubter need only look in the Bible if he wished to settle his mind—and then the texts were read aloud to us to make the matter sure; if the slaves themselves had an aversion to slavery they were wise and said nothing.
“Poor thing, when he sings, it shows that he is not remembering, and that comforts me; but when he is still, I am afraid he is thinking, and I cannot bear it. He will never see his mother again; if he can sing, I must not hinder it, but be thankful for it. If you were older, you would understand me; then that friendless child’s noise would make you glad.”
life does not consist mainly—or even largely—of facts and happenings. It consists mainly of the storm of thoughts that is forever blowing through one’s head
I am confident that by that time the nation, encountering the Morris incident in my autobiography, would be trying to remember what the incident was, and not succeeding. That incident, which is so large to-day, will be so small three or four months from now it will then have taken its place with the abortive Russian revolution and these other large matters, and nobody will be able to tell one from the other by difference of size.
Thanksgiving Day, a function which originated in New England two or three centuries ago when those people recognized that they really had something to be thankful for—annually, not oftener—if they had succeeded in exterminating their neighbors, the Indians, during the previous twelve months instead of getting exterminated by their neighbors the Indians. Thanksgiving Day became a habit, for the reason that in the course of time, as the years drifted on, it was perceived that the exterminating had ceased to be mutual and was all on the white man’s side, consequently on the Lord’s side, consequently it was proper to thank the Lord for it and extend the usual annual compliments. The original reason for a Thanksgiving Day has long ago ceased to exist—the Indians have long ago been comprehensively and satisfactorily exterminated and the account closed with Heaven, with the thanks due. But, from old habit, Thanksgiving Day has remained with us, and every year the President of the United States and the Governors of all the several States and the territories set themselves the task, every November, to advertise for something to be thankful for, and then they put those thanks into a few crisp and reverent phrases, in the form of a Proclamation, and this is read from all the pulpits in the land, the national conscience is wiped clean with one swipe, and sin is resumed at the old stand.
[T]here are two separate and distinct kinds of Christian morals, so separate, so distinct, so unrelated that they are no more kin to each other than are archangels and politicians. The one kind is Christian private morals, the other is Christian public morals
I could not really complain, because he had only given me his word of honor as security; I ought to have required of him something substantial.
I was always handsome. Anybody but a critic could have seen it.
Jay Gould was the mightiest disaster which has ever befallen this country. The people had desired money before his day, but he taught them to fall down and worship it.
John D. Rockefeller is quite evidently a sincere man. Satan, twaddling sentimental sillinesses to a Sunday-school, could be no burlesque upon John D. Rockefeller and his performances in his Cleveland Sunday-school.
“What was he born for? What was his father born for? What was I born for? What is anybody born for?” [...] His father was a poet, but was doomed to grind out his living in a most uncongenial occupation—the editing of a daily political newspaper. He was a singing bird in a menagerie of monkeys, macaws, and hyenas. His life was wasted. [...] “What was he born for? What was the use of it?” These tiresome and monotonous repetitions of the human life—where is their value?
We are always more anxious to be distinguished for a talent which we do not possess than to be praised for the fifteen which we do possess.
Persons who think there is no such thing as luck—good or bad—are entitled to their opinion, although I think they ought to be shot for it.
Honored Sir: Your patriotic virtues have won for you the homage of half the nation and the enmity of the other half. This places your character as a citizen upon a summit as high as Washington’s. The verdict is unanimous and unassailable. The votes of both sides are necessary in cases like these, and the votes of the one side are quite as valuable as are the votes of the other. Where the votes are all in a public man’s favor the verdict is against him. It is sand, and history will wash it away. But the verdict for you is rock, and will stand.
[Roosevelt] knew perfectly well that to pen six hundred helpless and weaponless savages in a hole like rats in a trap and massacre them in detail during a stretch of a day and a half, from a safe position on the heights above, was no brilliant feat of arms—and would not have been a brilliant feat of arms even if Christian America, represented by its salaried soldiers, had shot them down with Bibles and the Golden Rule instead of bullets.
I have been listening to what has been said about citizenship. You complain of the police. You created the police. You are responsible for the police. They must reflect you
The entire nation laughs, yet in its innocent dulness never suspects that it is laughing at itself. But that is what it is doing.
I prefer good taste to righteousness.
I am sure I know more about lying than anybody who has lived on this planet before me. [...] I know all about audiences, they believe everything you say, except when you are telling the truth.
Twice the bills were accompanied by offensive letters from the Secretary. These I answered profanely.
How childish it all seems now! And how brutal—that I could not be moved to confer upon my wife a precious and lasting joy because it would cause me a small inconvenience.
That Bible Class is so uninured to anything resembling either truth or sense that I think a clean straight truth falling in its midst would make as much havoc as a bombshell.
I should talk to the stenographer two hours a day for a hundred years, I should still never be able to set down a tenth part of the things which have interested me in my lifetime.
It was during my first year’s apprenticeship in the Courier office that I did a thing which I have been trying to regret for fifty-five years.
I told him what I believed to be true—that the McKinleys and the Roosevelts and the multimillionaire disciples of Jay Gould—that man who in his brief life rotted the commercial morals of this nation and left them stinking when he died—have quite completely transformed our people from a nation with pretty high and respectable ideals to just the opposite of that; that our people have no ideals now that are worthy of consideration; that our Christianity which we have always been so proud of—not to say so vain of—is now nothing but a shell, a sham, a hypocrisy; that we have lost our ancient sympathy with oppressed peoples struggling for life and liberty; that when we are not coldly indifferent to such things we sneer at them, and that the sneer is about the only expression the newspapers and the nation deal in with regard to such things.
Some of us, even the whiteheaded, may live to see the blessed day when Czars and Grand Dukes will be as scarce there as I trust they are in heaven.
I have made it a rule never to smoke more than one cigar at a time. I have no other restriction as regards smoking.
I have lived a severely moral life. But it would be a mistake for other people to try that, or for me to recommend it.
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