Directory of Mark Twain's maxims, quotations, and various opinions:

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CONGRESS

Fleas can be taught nearly anything that a Congressman can. - What Is Man? ...the smallest minds and the selfishest souls and the cowardliest hearts that God makes. - Letter fragment, 1891 Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself. - Mark Twain, a Biography Congressman is the trivialist distinction for a full grown man. - Notebook #14, Nov. 1877 - July 1878 All Congresses and Parliaments have a kindly feeling for idiots, and a compassion for them, on account of personal experience and heredity. - Mark Twain's Autobiography; also in Mark Twain in Eruption

Illustration from AMERICAN EXAMINER, 1910 from the Dave Thomson collection

The lightning there is peculiar; it is so convincing, that when it strikes a thing it doesn't leave enough of that thing behind for you to tell whether--Well, you'd think it was something valuable, and a Congressman had been there.
- Mark Twain's Speeches, "The Weather"

It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress.
- Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar

It is the foreign element that commits our crimes. There is no native criminal class except Congress.
- More Maxims of Mark, Johnson, 1927

Whiskey is carried into committee rooms in demijohns and carried out in demagogues.
- Notebook, 1868

...I never can think of Judas Iscariot without losing my temper. To my mind Judas Iscariot was nothing but a low, mean, premature, Congressman.
- "Foster's Case," New York Tribune, 10 March 1873

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