Weather is a literary specialty, and no untrained hand can turn out a good article on it
Mark TwainRead
I am not the editor of a newspaper and shall always try to do right and be good so that God will not make me one.
Interpretation
Mark Twain expresses his intention to live a moral life free from the pressures of journalistic influence.
In this quote, Mark Twain humorously reflects on the nature of journalism and the ethical dilemmas that often accompany it. By stating that he will strive to do good so that he is not made an editor of a newspaper, he implies that the demands of that role may conflict with personal integrity and honesty, suggesting a critique of sensationalism in media and the moral choices individuals must face in their careers.
In practice
This quote could be used in a speech about ethics in journalism.
Weather is a literary specialty, and no untrained hand can turn out a good article on it
The easy part of being an artist is figuring out the message that everyone else is ready to hear. The hard part is waiting for the proper lull to make the announcement.
You can't reason with your heart; it has its own laws, and thumps about things which the intellect scorns.
To be good is noble; but to show others how to be good is nobler and no trouble.
Name the greatest of all inventors. Accident.
In Paris they just simply opened their eyes and stared when we spoke to them in French! We never did succeed in making those idiots understand their own language.
The modern habit of doing ceremonial things unceremoniously is no proof of humility; rather it proves the offender's inability to forget himself in the rite, and his readiness to spoil for every one else the proper pleasure of ritual.
Cinna wishes to seem poor, and is poor
So long as we represent technology as an instrument, we remain held fast in the will to master it.
The present urgency is to begin thinking within the context of the whole planet, the integral earth community with all its human and other-than-human components.
The greatest country, the richest country, is not that which has the most capitalists, monopolists, immense grabbings, vast fortunes, with its sad, sad soil of extreme, degrading, damning poverty, but the land in which there are the most homesteads, freeholds - where wealth does not show such contrasts high and low, where all men have enough - a modest living- and no man is made possessor beyond the sane and beautiful necessities.
The fact that no limits exist to the destructiveness of this weapon [the 'Super', i.e. the hydrogen bomb] makes its very existence and the knowledge of its construction a danger to humanity as a whole. It is necessarily an evil thing considered in any light. For these reasons, we believe it important for the President of the United States to tell the American public and the world what we think is wrong on fundamental ethical principles to initiate the development of such a weapon.
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