 Special photo colorization by Dave Thomson |
Christian governments are as frank today, as open and above-board, in
discussing projects for raiding each other's clothes-lines as ever they
were before the Golden Rule came smiling into this inhospitable world
and couldn't get a night's lodging anywhere. |
...nations have no command over their governments, & in fact no influence
over them, except of a fleeting & rather ineffectual sort.
- Letter to Baroness von Suttner, 17 February 1898
I think it is not wise for an emperor, or a king, or a president, to come down
into the boxing ring, so to speak, and lower the dignity of his office by meddling
in the small affairs of private citizens.
- Mark Twain in Eruption
The government of my country snubs honest simplicity, but fondles artistic
villainy, and I think I might have developed into a very capable pickpocket
if I had remained in the public service a year or two.
- Roughing It
That's the difference between governments and individuals. Governments don't
care, individuals do.
- A Tramp Abroad
...no country can be well governed unless its citizens as a body keep religiously
before their minds that they are the guardians of the law and that the law officers
are only the machinery for its execution, nothing more.
- The Gilded Age
The mania for giving the Government power to meddle with the private affairs
of cities or citizens is likely to cause endless trouble, through the rivaly
of schools and creeds that are anxious to obtain official recognition, and there
is great danger that our people will lose our independence of thought and action
which is the cause of much of our greatness, and sink into the helplessness
of the Frenchman or German who expects his government to feed him when hungry,
clothe him when naked, to prescribe when his child may be born and when he may
die, and, in fine, to regulate every act of humanity from the cradle to the
tomb, including the manner in which he may seek future admission to paradise.
- "Official
Physic"
There is a phrase which has grown so common in the world's mouth that it has
come to seem to have sense and meaning--the sense and meaning implied when it
is used: that is the phrase which refers to this or that or the other nation
as possibly being "capable of self-government;" and the implied sense
of it is, that there has been a nation somewhere, some time or other, which
wasn't capable of it - wasn't as able to govern itself as some self-appointed
specailists were or would be to govern it. The master minds of all nations,
in all ages, have sprung, in affluent multitude, from the mass of the nation,
and from the mass of the nation only--not from its privileged classes; and so,
no matter what the nation's intellectual grade was, whether high or low, the
bulk of its ability was in the long ranks of its nameless and its poor, and
so it never saw the day that it had not the material in abuncance whereby to
govern itself. Which is to assert an always self-proven fact: that even the
best governed and most free and most enlightened monarchy is still behind the
best condition attainable by its people; and that the same is true of kindred
governments of lower grades all the way down to the lowest.
- A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
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