Mark Twain

There are 869 different forms of lying, but only one of them has been squarely forbidden. Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.

A person who has a cat by the tail knows a whole lot more about cats than someone who has just read about them.

Children have but little charity for one another's defects

There is nothing that saps one's confidence as the knowing how to do a thing

For the majority of us, the past is a regret, the future an experiment

It's better to be an optimist who is sometimes wrong than a pessimist who is always right

I am not an economist. I am an honest man!

A man may have no bad habits and have worse

You can go to heaven if you want. I'd rather stay in Bermuda.

Pessimist: The optimist who didn't arrive.

I like a good story well told. That is the reason I am sometimes forced to tell them myself.

What is the real function, the essential function, the supreme function, of language? Isn't it merely to convey ideas and emotions? Certainly. Then if we can do it with words of fonetic brevity and compactness, why keep the present cumbersome forms?

Between believing a thing and thinking you KNOW is only a small step and quickly taken.

Why waste your money looking up your family tree? Just go into politics and your opponent will do it for you.

Out of the public schools comes the greatness of the nation.

In religion, India is the only millionaire... the One land that all men desire to see, and having seen once, by even a glimpse, would not give that glimpse for all the shows of all the rest of the globe combined.

The man who is ostentatious of his modesty is twin to the statue that wears a fig-leaf.

Circumstances make man, not man circumstances.

Truth is neither alive nor dead; it just aggravates itself all the time.

Never argue with people who buy ink by the gallon.

Moralists and philosophers have adjudged those who throw temptation in the way of the erring, equally guilty with those who are thereby led into evil