We are called the nation of inventors. And we are. We could still claim that title and wear its loftiest honors if we had stopped with the first thing we ever invented, which was human liberty.
- Foreign Critics speech, 1890

But we are fearfully and wonderfully made, and we glorious Americans will occasionally astonish the God that created us when we get a fair start.
- "The Bolters in Convention," Territorial Enterprise, 12/30/1863

Mark Twain's answer to a would-be writer:
"Young Author"--Yes, Agassiz does recommend authors to eat fish, because the phosphorus in it makes brain. So far you are correct. But I cannot help you to a decision about the amount you need to eat--at least not with certainty. If the specimen composition you send is about your fair usual average, I suggest that perhaps a couple of whales would be all you would want for the present. Not the largest kind, but simply good middling-sized whales.
- "Answers to Correspondents", Sketches New and Old

You ought never to "sass" old people- unless they "sass" you first.
- Advice for Good Little Girls

It is wrong to put a sheepskin under your shirt when you know that you are going to get a licking. It is better to retire swiftly to a secret place and weep over your bad conduct until the storm blows over.
- Advice for Good Little Boys

You should never do anything wicked and lay it on your brother, when it is just as convenient to lay it on some other boy.
- Advice for Good Little Boys
Be respectful to your superiors, if you have any.

- Advice to Young People speech, 4/15/1882
Praise is well, compliment is well, but affection--that is the last and final and most precious reward that any man can win, whether by character or achievement.
- Affection speech, 1907

One must keep one's character. Earn a character first if you can, and if you can't, then assume one. From the code of moals I have been following and revising and revising for 72 years I remember one detail. All my life I have been honest--comparatively honest. I could never use money I had not made honestly--I could only lend it.
- Speech 12/22/1907

There is no character, howsoever good and fine, but it can be destroyed by ridicule, howsoever poor and witless. Observe the ass, for instance: his character is about perfect, he is the choicest spirit among all the humbler animals, yet see what ridicule has brought him to. Instead of feeling complimented when we are called an ass, we are left in doubt.
- Pudd'nhead Wilson

SOCIETY When red-headed people are above a certain social grade their hair is auburn. - A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court I feel for Adam and Eve now, for I know how it was with them....The Garden of Eden I now know was an unendurable solitude. I know that the advent of the serpent was a welcome change--anything for society. - Mark Twain, a Biography ...heaven for climate; hell for society. - Tammany and Croker speech We may not doubt that society in heaven consists mainly of undesirable persons. - Mark Twain's Notebook, 1902-1903 There are no common people except in the highest spheres of society. - quoted in Abroad with Mark Twain and Eugene Field, Fisher

Photo of Clemens 1901 at Lake Saranac by W. B. Northrop

NATURE Nature knows no indecencies; man invents them. - Mark Twain's Notebook How blind and unreasoning and arbitrary are some of the laws of nature--most of them in fact! - "A Double-Barrelled Detective Story" Nature makes the locust with an appetite for crops; man would have made him with an appetite for sand--I mean a man with the least little bit of common sense. - Following the Equator, Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar Architects cannot teach nature anything. - "Memorable Midnight Experience" It is strange and fine--Nature's lavish generosities to her creatures. At least to all of them except man. For those that fly she has provided a home that is nobly spacious--a home which is forty miles deep and envelopes the whole globe, and has not an obstruction in it. For those that swim she has provided a more than imperial domain--a domain which is miles deep and covers four-fifths of the globe. But as for man, she has cut him off with the mere odds and ends of the creation. She has given him the thin skin, the meager skin which is stretched over the remaining one-fifth--the naked bones stick up through it in most places. On the one-half of this domain he can raise snow, ice, sand, rocks, and nothing else. So the valuable part of his inheritance really consists of but a single fifth of the family estate; and out of it he has to grub hard to get enough to keep him alive and provide kings and soldiers and powder to extend the blessings of civilization with. Yet, man, in his simplicity and complacency and inability to cipher, thinks Nature regards him as the important member of the family--in fact, her favorite. Surely, it must occur to even his dull head, sometimes, that she has a curious way of showing it. - Following the Equator

THE CHURCH HE ATTENDED

AHCC's History

Asylum Hill, a sister church of Thomas Hooker's First Congregational Church, was established in 1865. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries it flourished as the church of local financiers, public and corporate officials, and the Hartford literary community. Mark Twain rented a pew in the sanctuary and Harriet Beecher Stowe was a frequent attendee. Joseph Twichell, our first minister, was a close friend of Twain's and the traveling companion mentioned in Twain's book "A Tramp Abroad".

LINKS

http://www.geocities.com/swaisman/

http://marktwain.about.com/arts/marktwain/

http://www.twainquotes.com/

http://www.marktwainsamerica.com/

http://www.salwen.com/mtnytour.html

http://www.midwinter.com/lurk/making/warprayer.html