Culture

Great hates 4: Mark Twain

July 18, 2007
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Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1835-1910), better known to the world as Mark Twain, considered the lifelong duty of his acerbic pen—as he put it a letter of 1888, accepting an honorary MA from Yale—to be "the deriding of shams, the exposure of pretentious falsities, the laughing of stupid superstitions out of existence." It was a role which, he continued, made him "the natural enemy of royalties, nobilities, privileges and all kindred swindles, and the natural friend of human rights and human liberties," and he embraced it wholeheartedly.

These are just a few of his assaults on the "swindles" he saw deforming humanity in the nineteenth century, and of which the world remains far from free…

On slavery:

The skin of every human being contains a slave. [ Notebook]
On God and religion:
When one reads Bibles, one is less surprised at what the Deity knows than at what He doesn't know [ Notebook]
More than once I have been humiliated by my resemblance to God the father; He is always longing for the love of His children and trying to get it on the cheapest and laziest terms He can invent. [letter to Clara Clemens]
On religion and politics:
In religion and politics people's beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination, from authorities who have not themselves examined the questions at issue but have taken them at second-hand from other non-examiners, whose opinions about them were not worth a brass farthing. [ The Autobiography of Mark Twain]
Look at the tyranny of party—at what is called party allegiance, party loyalty—a snare invented by designing men for selfish purposes—and which turns voters into chattels, slaves, rabbits, and all the while their masters and they themselves are shouting rubbish about liberty, independence, freedom of opinion, freedom of speech, honestly unconscious of the fantastic contradiction; and forgetting or ignoring that their fathers and the churches shouted the same blasphemies a generation earlier when they were closing their doors against the hunted slave, beating his handful of humane defenders with Bible texts and billies, and pocketing the insults and licking the shoes of his Southern master. [ The Autobiography of Mark Twain]
On wealth and the wealthy:
It is easier for a needle to go through a camel's eye than for a rich woman to sprain her ankle & keep it out of the papers. [Letter to Carolyn Wells]
The lack of money is the root of all evil. [ More Maxims of Mark]