Mark Twain

I have done more for San Francisco than any of its old residents. Since I left there it has increased in population fully 300,000. I could have done more - I could have gone earlier - it was suggested.

I fell in love with the most cordial and sociable city in the Union.

It{California} is the land where the fabled Aladdin's Lamp lies buried-and she {San Francisco} is the new Aladdin who shall seize it from its obscurity and summon the genie and command him to crown her with power and greatness and bring to her feet the hoarded treasures of the earth.

I am personally acquainted with hundreds of journalists, and the opinion of the majority of them would not be worth tuppence in private, but when they speak in print it is the newspaper that is talking (the pygmy scribe is not visible) and then their utterances shake the community like the thunders of prophecy.

From the dome of St. Peter's one can see every notable object in Rome... He can see a panorama that is varied, extensive, beautiful to the eye, and more illustrious in history than any other in Europe.

Newport, Rhode Island, that breeding place-that stud farm, so to speak-of aristocracy; aristocracy of the American type.

When the human race has once acquired a superstition, nothing short of death is ever likely to remove it.

Figures often beguile me, particularly when I have the arranging of them myself; in which case the remark attributed to Disraeli would often apply with justice and force: \'There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.\'

It is no harm to be an ass, if one is content to bray and not kick.

There ought to be a room in every house to swear in. It's dangerous to have to repress an emotion like that.

I have never heard enough classical music to be able to enjoy it; & the simple truth is, I detest it. Not mildly, but will all my heart. To me an opera is the very climax & cap-stone of the absurd, the fantastic the unjustifiable. I hate the very name of opera - partly because of the nights of suffering I have endured in its presence, & partly because I want to love it and can't.

I have witnessed and greatly enjoyed the first act of everything which Wagner created, but the effect on me has always been so powerful that one act was quite sufficient; whenever I have witnessed two acts I have gone away physically exhausted; and whenever I have ventured an entire opera the result has been the next thing to suicide.

I have attended operas, whenever I could not help it, for fourteen years now; I am sure I know of no agony comparable to the listening to an unfamiliar opera.

...there isn't often anything in Wagner opera that one would call by such a violent name as acting.

The humorist who invented trial by jury played a colossal practical joke upon the world, but since we have the system we ought to try and respect it. A thing which is not thoroughly easy to do, when we reflect that by command of the law a criminal juror must be an intellectual vacuum, attached to a melting heart and perfectly macaronian bowels of compassion.

If all the fools in this world should die, lordly God how lonely I should be.

If you send a damned fool to St. Louis, and you don't tell them he's a damned fool, they'll never find out.

Tight pants are just uncomfortable.

Twenty-four years ago I was strangely handsome; in San Francisco in the rainy season I was often mistaken for fair weather.

Most of the things I worried about in life never happened.

God cures and the doctor sends the bill.

In love, you pay as you leave.

The only people who should use the possessive 'we' are kings, newspaper editors, and persons with tapeworms.

When you feel like tellin a feller to go to the devil - tell him to go to Chicago - it'll anser every purpose, and is perhaps, a leetle more expensive.

[N]o country can be well governed unless its citizens as a body keep religiously before their minds that they are the guardians of the law and that the law officers are only the machinery for its execution, nothing more.

All I say is, kings is kings, and you got to make allowances. Take them all around, they're a mighty ornery lot. It's the way they're raised.

A man who keeps company with glaciers comes to feel tolerably insignificant by and by.

You may honestly feel grateful that homeopathy survived the attempts of the allopaths (orthodoxy) to destroy it.

The cigar-box which the European calls a 'lift' needs but to be compared with our elevators to be appreciated. The lift stops to reflect between floors. That is all right in a hearse, but not in elevators. The American elevator acts like a man's patent purge-it works.

An American has not seen the United States until he has seen Mardi-Gras in New Orleans.