|
|
The only very marked difference between the average civilized man and the average
savage is that the one is gilded and the other is painted.
- Mark Twain's Notebook
Civilization is a limitless multiplication of unnecessary necessities.
- More Maxims of Mark, Johnson, 1927
I have been reading the morning paper. I do it every morning--knowing well
that I shall find in it the usual depravities and basenesses and hypocrisies
and cruelties that make up civilization, and cause me to put in the rest of
the day pleading for the damnation of the human race. I cannot seem to get my
prayers answered, yet I do not despair.
- Letter to William Dean Howells, 2 April 4 1899
There is a great difference between feeding parties to wild beasts and stirring
up their finer feelings in an inquisition. One is the system of degraded barbarians,
the other of enlightened civilized people.
- The Innocents Abroad
Would it not be prudent to get our civilization tools together, and see how
much stock is left on hand in the way of Glass Beads and Theology, and Maxim
Guns and Hymn Books, and Trade Gin and Torches of Progress and Enlightenment
(patent adjustable ones, good to fire villages with, upon occasion), and balance
the books, and arrive at the profit and loss, so that we may intelligently decide
whether to continue the business or sellout the property and start a new Civilization
Scheme on the proceeds.
- "To the Person Sitting in Darkness"
Is it, perhaps, possible that there are two kinds of Civilization--one for home
consumption and one for the heathen market?
- "To the Person Sitting in Darkness"
There is no salvation for us but to adopt Civilization and lift ourselves down
to its level.
- "To the Person sitting in Darkness"
There are many humorous things in the world; among them, the white man's notion
that he less savage than the other savages.
- Following the Equator
Every civilization carries the seeds of its own destruction, and the same cycle
shows in them all. The Republic is born, flourishes, decays into plutocracy,
and is captured by the shoemaker whom the mercenaries and millionaires make
into a king. The people invent their oppressors, and the oppressors serve the
function for which they are invented.
- Mark Twain in Eruption
The peoples furthest from civilization are the ones where equality between man
and woman are furthest apart--and we consider this one of the signs of savagery.
- Notebook, 1895
My idea of our civilization is that it is a shoddy, poor thing and full of cruelties,
vanities, arrogances, meannesses and hypocricies. As for the word, I hate the
sound of it, for it conveys a lie; & as for the thing itself, I wish it
was in hell, where it belongs.
- Letter to Joseph Twichell, 27 January 1900
_____
What is a civilization, rightly considered? Morally, it is the
evil passions repressed, the level of conduct raised; spiritually, idols cast
down, God enthroned; materially, bread and fair treatment for the greatest number.
That is the common formula, the common definition; everybody accepts it and
is satisfied with it.
Our civilization is wonderful, in certain spectacular and meretricious ways;
wonderful in scientific marvels and inventive miracles; wonderful in material
inflation, which it calls advancement, progress, and other pet names; wonderful
in its spying-out of the deep secrets of Nature and its vanquishment of her
stubborn laws; wonderful in its extraordinary financial and commerical achievements;
wonderful in its hunger for money, and in its indifference as to how it is acquired;
wonderful in the hitherto undreamed-of magnitude of its private fortunes and
the prodigal fashion in which they are given away to institutions devoted to
the public culture; wonderful in its exhibitions of poverty; wonderful in the
surprises which it gets out of that great new birth, Organization, the latest
and most potent creation and miracle-worker of the commercialized intellect,
as applied in transportation systems, in manufactures, in systems of communication,
in news-gathering, book-publishing, journalism; in protecting labor; in oppressing
labor; in herding the national parties and keeping the sheep docile and usable;
in closing the public service against brains and character; in electing purchasable
legislatures, blatherskite Congresses, and city governments which rob the town
and sell municipal protection to gamblers, thieves, prostitutes, and professional
seducers for cash. It is a civilization which has destroyed the simplicity and
repose of life; replaced its contentment, its poetry, its soft romance-dreams
and visions with the money-fever, sordid ideals, vulgar ambitions, and the sleep
which does not refresh; it has invented a thousand useless luxuries, and turned
them into necessities; it has created a thousand vicious appetites and satisfies
none of them; it has dethroned God and set up a shekel in His place.
- "Papers of the Adam Family"
_____
If you will notice, there is seldom a telegram in a paper which fails to show
up one or more members & beneficiaries of our Civilization as promenading
with his shirt-tail up & the rest of his regalia in the wash.
- Letter to William Dean Howells, 26 January 1900
Civilization largely consists in hiding human nature. When the barbarian learns
to hide it we account him enlightened.
- quoted in I Remember by Opie Read, 1930
Illustration from first edition of LIFE ON THE MISSISSIPPI
How solemn and beautiful is the thought that the earliest pioneer of civilization,
the van-leader of civilization, is never the steamboat, never the railroad,
never the newspaper, never the Sabbath-school, never the missionary -- but always
whiskey! Such is the case. Look history over; you will see. The missionary comes
after the whiskey -- I mean he arrives after the whiskey has arrived; next comes
the poor immigrant, with ax and hoe and rifle; next, the trader; next, the miscellaneous
rush; next, the gambler, the desperado, the highwayman, and all their kindred
in sin of both sexes; and next, the smart chap who has bought up an old grant
that covers all the land; this brings the lawyer tribe; the vigilance committee
brings the undertaker. All these interests bring the newspaper; the newspaper
starts up politics and a railroad; all hands turn to and build a church and
a jail -- and behold! civilization is established forever in the land. But whiskey,
you see, was the van-leader in this beneficent work. It always is. It was like
a foreigner -- and excusable in a foreigner -- to be ignorant of this great
truth, and wander off into astronomy to borrow a symbol. But if he had been
conversant with the facts, he would have said: Westward the Jug of Empire takes
its way.
- Life on the Mississippi
I believe that many a person has examined man with a microscope in every age
of the world; has found that he did not even resemble the creature he pretended
to be; has perceived that a civilization not proper matter for derision has
always been and must always remain impossible to him -- and has put away his
microscope and kept his mouth shut. Perhaps because the microscopist (besides
having an influential wife) was built like the rest of the human race -- ninety-nine
parts of him being moral cowardice. ... civilization are not realities, but
only dreams; dreams of the mind, not of the heart, and therefore fictitious,
and perishable; that they have never affected the heart and therefore have no
valuable progress; that the heart remains today what it always was, as intimacy
with any existing savage tribe shall show. Indeed the average of the human 'brain'
is not a shade higher today than it was in Egyptian times ten thousand years
ago.
- Letter to Carl Thalbitzer, 26 November 1902. Reprinted in Harper's Magazine,
December 2009.
Quotations | Newspaper Articles | Special Features | Links | Search
